25 Great Blogger Widgets
February 16, 2009
Many people think that Blogger lacks in all of the extra goodies you can add to other platforms like WordPress, but it simply isn’t true. By using widgets you can customize your blog as much as you like by just adding little snippets of code to the sidebars.
Allow users to talk to you via IM, see what your most popular posts are, or even read news from sites such as Mashable. With these 25 widgets, you can create an even more powerful way of communicating with your visitors, just make sure you don’t overload them with too many!
What are some of your favorite widgets for use on Blogger?
Communications Widgets
Google Talk – Give visitors the ability to talk to you via Google Talk directly from your blog sidebar.
Jaxtr – Create a widget that allows people to call you on the phone without revealing the phone number to them.
Meebo Me – Meebo Me will allow you to create a chat box that you can install on your Blogger page, giving you the chance to converse with visitors to your site.
Skype – The official Skype widget allows you to create various buttons that can show your current status and also allows people to just click it and give you a call.
Tag-Board – Allows you to add a real-time chat board to your blog that your visitors and you can use to converse.
Social Widgets
Delicious Linkrolls – Share your Delicious bookmarks with the world with this easy to install linkroll widget.
FriendFeed Widget – Share all of your FriendFeed activity with the readers of your site.
Google Friend Connect – A makeshift social network that runs across any site that has installed Google Friend Connect. You can join a site, see the other members, play games and more.
LinkedInABox – LinkedInABox retrieves your LinkedIn profile to display on your blog, allowing people to look through things such as your specialties and experience.
MyBlogLog – If someone visits your blog that is also a member of MyBlogLog, their avatar and username will appear in the box. You can then click on any person to check out their profile on the service.
Twitter – Add your Twitter stream to your blog and display anywhere from your last tweet to the last twenty. Also gives a link for people to be able to follow you.
Share on Facebook – A simple widget that allows your readers to share items from your blog on Facebook.
SocialFeed – A miniature lifestreaming widget that broadcasts your activities on sites such as Twitter, StumbleUpon, Last.fm and so on. Has several different skins you can choose from.
Utility Widgets
Add This – The popular social bookmarking button is available for Blogger accounts.
Easy Comments – This widget allows you to add commenting to any page of your site by placing the widget at the bottom of a page. Allows people to say if they liked the comment, includes comment threading and more.
Google Search – Add an AJAX powered Google search box to your blog that you can allow to search the web and your blog, or even just restrict it to the contents of your site.
Popular Posts – This widget will take a look at your comments, up to the last 5,000, and generate a list of which posts had the most conversation around them.
Recent Comments – Display the most recent comments on your blog in this widget so that readers can join in the conversation.
Related Posts – Not so much a widget as a hack, this will give you the related post functionality that so many WordPress powered blogs use.
ShareThis – The highly customizable green button that ShareThis is known for can be added to your blog. Choose if you want it for social bookmarking, users emailing your posts and more.
Shout List Icons – Be the king (or queen) of social sharing with this widget that generates icons for over 30 social sites your blog can be added to.
Tag/Label Cloud – Gives you the ability to install a traditional tag cloud in your sidebar so people can see what you write about the most.
Miscellaneous Widgets
Flickr – You can generate an HTML or Flash based badge of your photo stream to share your images with your visitors.
Mashable – Yes, now you too can share the best web-related news on your blog with the Mashable widget.
Picasa Albums – Display your public Picasa albums in your blog sidebar with this handy widget.
Interested in more Blogger resources? Check these out:
- 50 More Beautiful Blogger Templates
- Blogger.com Toolbox: 30+ Tools and Resources for Bloggers
- 70 Fresh and Modern Blogger Templates
- 30+ Great Resources for Blogger Templates
- 10 Unique Blogger Templates
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Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:
Blogger Servers Knocked Out for an Hour
Blogger Adds Video Uploading Feature
Blogger (finally) Implements Email Comment Tracking
Colts Release MySpace Slideshow Widget
The Blogger Divide?
Help Catch the Bad Guys with New Widgets from the FBI
Feedburner Comes to Blogger: Google Analytics Next?
5 Google Tips for Beauty Lovers
February 16, 2009
1. Set Google Alerts to get the scoop on new makeup collections
Lawd knows we love beauty, but keeping up with the latest makeup releases and beauty product rollouts can take forever!
Use Google Alerts to save time; find out what’s new from brands like MAC and Dior in a flash. All you need is an email address.
Just visit Google’s alerts page at www.google.com/alerts, input your search term (short and sweet works best, like [mac cosmetics] without the braces), your email address and how often you’d like to receive them and TADA! — beauty news delivered straight to your inbox.
CAUTION: It’s hella easy to create too many Google Alerts, LOL! At one point I was getting 27 Alerts emails per day, but at the bottom of every one is a link to quickly and easily cancel if they get to be a problem.
A few other ways to use Google Alerts…
- Find out who’s talking about you. Try an alert on your name.
- What are they saying about your website?
- Find bargains with alerts like [makeup sale].
2. Search inside specific websites
Sometimes I know the answer I’m looking for is posted somewhere on a particular website, but for the life of me I just can’t find it. Enter Google’s [site:] search operator.
If you include [site:] in your query, Google will restrict the results to that site only, like [mac site:www.makeupalley.com] will find pages about Mac within www.makeupalley.com, and ["mac cosmetics" site:www.makeupalley.com] will find pages where the term mac cosmetics (searches aren’t case sensitive) appears because the double quotes tell Google to search for an exact term, in this case “mac cosmetics”.
Note: There shouldn’t be a space between the [site:] and the website domain.
3. Conduct a Google blog search
Sometimes I like to restrict my Google searches to blogs, like if I’m looking for product previews or swatches before a major release.
4. Smooth operators
If you want to make the most of your Googling for beauty, try some of these advanced search operators… 
link:
By using [link:], Google will list webpages that have links to a specific site. I use it when I’m just surfing, looking for new beauty blogs or finding out who has links to Makeup and Beauty Blog. For instance, [link:www.makeupalley.com] will list sites that have links pointing to Makeup Alley.
Note: Just like the [site:] search (and all of the other Google search operators), there shouldn’t be a space between the “link:” and the website’s name.
related:
The term [related:] will list web pages that are similar to another site. OOH! This one is soooo much fun. For example, [related:www.bellasugar.com] will list websites that are similar to BellaSugar.com.
site:
If you include [site:] in your query, Google will restrict the results to that site only, like [mac site:www.makeupalley.com] will find pages about Mac within www.makeupalley.com, and ["mac cosmetics" site:www.makeupalley.com] will find pages where the term mac cosmetics (searches aren’t case sensitive) appears.
5. Tell Google Maps to find stores in your area
Entering the name of a store followed by your ZIP code and clicking ‘Maps’ returns a list of stores in your area along with a map. From there, you can click a thumbtack and choose ‘Get Directions’ to plot directions to the store. It won’t replace GPS, LOL! But I’ve used it from time to time.
Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,
Karen
© Karen for Makeup and Beauty Blog: Makeup Reviews, Beauty Tips and Drugstore Beauty Finds, 2009. | Permalink | 15 comments |
The State of Blog Search, 2009
February 16, 2009
What blog search engine should you use? That depends on your needs.
In order to join a conversation, you’ve got to be able to find it first. Three years ago “blog search” was expected to be a booming industry, startups left and right developed different technologies and more than a few raised millions of dollars to help users search the part of the web made up of blogs. These days no one thinks consumer-market blog search is a serious business, but many of us still have a need to limit searches to blogs. What should we do? ReadWriteWeb offers some recommendations and an assessment of the state of the industry below.
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Choosing a Blog Search Engine
Different circumstances call for different search engines. We’ve made a chart below illustrating our different recommendations to fill different needs. When, for example, we’re looking to see if anyone else has written about a breaking news story yet – we use Google Blogsearch because it’s the fastest. When we’re putting a live search feed on a public web page, though, we use Technorati and crank up the spam-control it offers. Many businesses use profesional blog tracking services for some of their search needs, but we’re not convinced those services are as useful as grabbing some of these worn old tools and doing it yourself.
Where These Services Stand Today
Technorati is the old stand-by, the blog search engine that the smartest blog lovers used to use. These days it’s a sad shadow of what it used to be. The company leadership is focused on building an advertising network and search features have been shed like there’s no tomorrow. The company’s developers say that features will be returning, just in a more accessible form, but we’re not holding our breath.
The service is slow, misses a lot of search results (perhaps in the name of spam prevention) and is so loaded down with cruft and extraneous page loads that it makes us want to scream.
That said, the fundamental value proposition of Technorati remains – it counts inbound links to every blog it has indexed and it will let you sort by that metric of “authority.” More advanced RSS-heads will appreciate the fact that Technorati delivers “authority” numbers in its RSS feeds and those numbers can be used to fine tune spam filtering in Yahoo Pipes.
Google Blogsearch is the fastest in the industry but has gone almost untouched since the day it launched, except for a recent dabble with memetracking on the front page. Google Blogsearch spam control is not good and recently the search engine started bringing back search results from places like blog sidebars. It thinks that content is new, too, every time a new blog post (the content we really care about) is published. It’s painful to look at Google Blogsearch results pages, but if you’ve got a need for speed or want to make use of the relative heft of the Google search input box for things like complex queries – then it’s a good option.
IceRocket is Mark Cuban’s baby and has improved more in recent years than anyone else on this list. It’s quite a sophisticated tool for searching blogs. It’s got trend analysis, author awareness and a number of other cool features. Unfortunately it only lets you organize search results by data and sometimes other needs arise.
IceRocket also misses some search results that even Technorati catches, though it catches some that Technorati misses as well.
Ask.com Blogsearch has become an unexpected favorite of ours over the years. It’s nice. Spam control is pretty good, speed is pretty good, the size of the index is pretty good. It’s a pretty good blog search engine. The best thing about it is that it’s very easy to sort results by relevance, date or “popularity” of the source, as defined by the number of subscribers the source feed has in Ask’s formerly market dominant feed reader Bloglines. Want to find out who the biggest blogs are that have written about Chihuahuas lately? (We’ll just tell you, it’s Jalopnik, Celebrity Baby Blog and Fark.)
If there’s a downside here, it’s that Ask does index a fair number of feeds that aren’t really blogs. And it doesn’t do anything else that’s particularly fabulous. None the less, we find ourselves going back to it every day.
FriendFeed is a lot of things, but it’s also a blog search engine of sorts. It’s a cross-network, real time social site originally built by a team of ex-Google employees. It’s pretty awesome and once you’ve got an account there you can search blog posts, Twitter messages, YouTube videos, SlideShare powerpoint presentations and much more. The down side is of course, it only lets you search the content that other users have synced with their FriendFeed account. That content has a whole lot of conversation going on around it though! Several members of the ReadWriteWeb team use the newly launched FriendDeck to do real-time tracking of FriendFeed. You can meet our whole team on FriendFeed here or join us in the RWW room (open to anyone) here.
That’s How We See it – What’s Blog Search Like for You These Days?
We’d love to hear about your favorite blog search tools these days. What do you use and in what circumstances do you use it? Is blog search itself old news in a new era of real-time microblogging? We welcome other perspectives on this field that may have lost some of its luster but remains useful and important several years after it was so hyped.
8 Tools to Track Your Footprints on the Web
February 16, 2009
Last week we looked at how easy it is to leave footprints on the Web; today we’ll show you how easy it is to track them.
Although search engines provide a great starting point when you’re searching for someone online, with all of the new social sites that have popped up over the past few years, they’re often just not enough.
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In our recent State of Blog Search 2009 post we discussed the various reasons you may choose to use any or all of the following blog search tools: Technorati, Google Blog Search, Ice Rocket, Ask.com Blogsearch, and FriendFeed. While these blog search engines are great to fill specific needs, they’re also another great place to look for your footprints on the Web.
However, you can drill down even more.
1. BlogPulse: Trends in the Blogosphere
Part of Nielsen-Online, BlogPulse highlights the top trends in the blogosphere and is mostly used to determine the hottest topics on the Web and how they got to be that way. But, its value as a personal monitoring tool can not be disregarded. Search for your name then grab the RSS feed to see who is talking about you and what they’re saying.
2. Pipl: Searching the Invisible Web
Pipl claims to search the deep or invisible Web to find documents, blog entries, photos, publicly available information that other search engines don’t serve up. It’s a great, fast search engine that we like; the only disadvantage is it offers no RSS feed.
3. Spy: Watching what Happens on the Web
According to the site, Spy can “listen in on the social media conversations you’re interested in.” This clean visualization search tool watches Twitter, FriendFeed, blog posts, Google reader shares and Flickr for any term you want. An RSS feed is available.
4. Serph: The Social Web Right Now
A brilliant tool for searching the social Web, Serph shows you what is being said about you “right now.” Serph gathers results from blog search engines, social media sites, social news sites and social bookmarking sites and offers an RSS feed for the results.
5. Social Mention: Mentions of your Name on the Social Web
Another great tool for searching the social Web, Social Mention offers a quick glance at mentions of your name on the Web. Just enter your name and switch between blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news or all of them at once. Slower than Serph, but occasionally offers different results. An RSS feed is available.
6. Monitter: Tracking Twitter
Monitter is one of the coolest looking monitoring tools for Twitter and one of the most useful. We’ve written about it before and although most people are using Twitter’s own search tool for search and alerts on Twitter, Monitter offers a little bit more. Giving you the option to search for three different keywords at once, Monitter is great if you want to keep your eye out for mentions of your name, your username and your company all at the same time. It also offers an RSS feed.
7. BoardTracker 2.0: The Ultimate Search Tool for Forums
BoardTracker is a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alert system that offers relevant results quickly. One of our favorite search tools for forums and message boards, BoardTracker currently tracks in excess of 1.2 billion posts.
8. Google Alerts: The big G
We couldn’t end this post without mentioning Google Alerts, although likely most of you are familiar with it. Although Microsoft and Yahoo have alert tools, Google’s offering beats them hands down. It offers e-mail and RSS alerts for any set of keywords including your name.
While we’re still waiting for that perfect product that will associate our names with our brands with our usernames, and send us the results instantly, we don’t expect to see it anytime soon (although we’ve got our fingers crossed), but we do hope that this list provides you with some alternatives to track your footprints across the Web.
If you’ve got a great tool you want to share, please let us know in the comments.
