To see Facebook Connect in action, visit Zowbie’s affiliate site, EverythingGeneva.com

A short list of the benefits of Facebook Connect include:

• Build a community with just one click!
• Login using your Facebook account
• Send comments and share articles to Facebook profile feed
• Invite your friends to the website’s community
• See last visitors with a short bio and link to Facebook profile
• Sign up for a website account without having to create an account; instead using your Facebook login info

I really like the idea of building a community within your website and Facebook Connect makes this easy with just one click of a button.  An additional feature which I love is the ease of which a website visitor using Facebook Connect is able to promote your website to their Facebook friends by sharing an article with friends on their wall or inviting them to join your site’s online community.

If you would like to have Facebook Connect installed on your website, contact us today!

Some other great ideas, especially pertaining to Facebook Connect and its implications for ecommerce can be found in the presentation from Razorfish embedded below – Portable Social Graphs: Imagining their Potential:

Let’s start with a definition of each:

Blog: A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website, usually maintained

EverythingWestVillage.com in basic WordPress blogging format

by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Website: A website (or “web site”) is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are hosted on one web server, usually accessible via the Internet.

Content Management System (CMS): A content management system (CMS) is a computer application used to create, edit, manage, search and publish various kinds of digital media and electronic text.

Background

The World Wide Web was “created” in 1990 by CERN engineer, Tim Berners-Lee.  On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone.  Websites were born.

Until recently the typical website is, what I would call, an “online billboard” for a company.  Websites were a place to go online to find information about a company and in some cases purchase goods or services directly from a checkout feature on the site.  The primary focus was to be an online advertisement for the company.  These “ads” gave a brief outline of the company’s products or services and listed contact info in hopes visitors would contact them.

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997.  The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999.  Blogs were born.

The introduction of blogs produced a different type of website.  These sites were typically created and used for purposes of an online journal by an individual.  Authors of blogs are called bloggers and the range of topics that they blog about differ from one to another, but typcially bloggers write what they are passionate about.

Enter Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 was first used by Dale Dougherty and Craig Cline and shortly after became notable after the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.  The term “Web 2.0″ refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design, that aims to facilitate communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.  Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.

Present Day

With the introduction of Web 2.0 somewhere along the way, web developers started to notice several benefits to designing websites using blog publishing applications; WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal to name a few.  These benefits are primarily associated with the content management system that the blog publishing application is built on.

Some of these benefits included:

• Easy web publishing solution (WYSIWYG)
• Easy integration of plugins and widgets
• Higher search engine rankings
• Lower costs
• Relational marketing
• Expert positioning for yourself or company

Where most people get confused is that they think of a blog as an online journal.  For this reason the term blog seems to have a negative connotation to most.  All of the websites (unless otherwise specified) designed by Zowbie Consulting are built using WordPress as the CMS, thus the websites we design could be called blogs.  For lack of a better term we will call the sites we design “blogsites”.

Website – Weblog – Blog – Blogsite

EverythingWestVillage.com as a "blogsite" using WordPress as a CMS. Designed by Zowbie Consulting

The design of a blogsite can be setup in such a way that it can be an exact duplicate of an “online billboard” type site (traditional website), however with the site being built on a content management system the website would have a lot more functionality.

Pictured at right is the  blogsite, EverythingWestVillage.com.  All the content (WordPress pages and posts) remain the same as that of the screenshot above, however the site features custom coding and style sheets which enable it to appear more like a website than the look above which people tend to associate to blogs.

The blogging component of a blogsite is used as a way to market to and generate future clients while the “website” is used more for the tools and application of working with current clients.  A blog is just a marketing tool inside your website.

A recap of what was learned.

A blog is a type of website, however a website is not necessarily a blog.  A blog uses a content management system (CMS), however not all websites use a CMS.

More examples of blogsites:

MTOBikes
Razor Family Farms
Saint Nicholas Episcopal Church
All About Roswell
Smyrna Vinings
Asher Pierre
Sold on Roswell

If you would like to receive more information about blogsites, please contact us.

Please post your comments or questions below.

The question led to a great conversation of whether or not a Flip video camcorder or webcam was the way to go.  Prior to the introduction of the Flip and other mini camcorders this question would have been relatively easy to answer.  With the emergence of the Flip and others though a debate is in order.  First, I’ll list what I see as advantages and disadvantages of both, then you post your opinion in the comments section below.

Webcam

Advantages

• convenient – no setup needed
• ideal for video conferencing or video chat programs
• easily livestream video

Disadvantages

• could forget to turn off and reveal your private life
• must be connected to a computer to function

Flip Video Camcorder

Advantages

• higher quality of video (especially with MinoHD model)
• small, compact, and light weight
• mobility/versatility

Disadvantages

• setup involved  (requires a tripod for best usage)
• image stabilization – video quality is significantly reduced if unit is not held still
• must upload video to computer, no direct connect while filming

The Flip most certainly appears to have caught the attention of most consumes, but for those that desire more of a “built-in” solution the webcam still seems to be the preferred method.

One last thing to mention, most Windows based laptops and just about all Apple computers (iSight camera) come with a built-in webcam…now that’s convenient!

Connect your virtual lives with the WordPress LinkedIn Application. With the WordPress App, you can sync your WordPress blog posts with your LinkedIn profile, keeping everyone you know in the know. Once added, you can filter your posts with a special LinkedIn tag and even display your personal WordPress Gravatar (global avatar). Updates are automatically sent to your network for instant notifications and gratification.

This should take you less than 5 minutes to complete, but it will most certainly leave a lasting impact on your business and its marketability.

To start, you will need to install the WordPress LinkedIn Application.  Click on the button that reads, “Add application”.

Next, type in your blog’s URL.  Example below.

That’s it…you’re done!  Now click on the “View My Profile” tab and you’ll see how the application has now integrated your WordPress blog feed into your LinkedIn profile.

1. Content is king – the more relevant content to your niche you have the more traffic you’ll get.  Remember, search engines are in the business of providing relevant content per given search.
2. Post regularly – early on this is very important as initially you will have very little content.  Posting regularly will show activity on your site and attract search engine spiders to crawl and re-index your site.
3. Seek others – find mentors in the blogging community, follow their blogs and from time to time ask if it is alright to repost their articles on your site (this will help with content). Use different title tags, descriptions, and keywords…this will differentiate the post from the source in the eyes of the search engines.
4. Write guest posts – offer to write guest posts on already established sites in exchange for backlinks to your site.  This is a great way to quickly gain traffic to yourself as well as quality backlinks from already established sites.
5. Network – I have yet to meet a fellow blogger that isn’t willing to help out another.  Connect with others and ask questions and share themes, plugins, ideas, etc.