CREATE BLOG |
PODCASTING FOR YOUR BLOG |
As with all photo work, some blog services make moblogging easier than others. Of the platforms covered in this book, Blogger and TypePad lead theway with built-in moblogging tools: Blogger.com provides two remote services, one e-mail and one phone. The e-mail service (called Mail-to-Blogger) does not accept photos, so that’s off the radar in this chapter. The phone service (called Blogger Mobile) works beautifully and gives you the option of moblogging to your already existing Blogger blog (if you have one) or creating a new blog just for your remotely posted pictures. . TypePad merges e-mail blogging with cell-phone blogging by allowing you to list several e-mail addresses from which your messages will come. You can assign one slot to your regular e-mail address and another slot to your phone’s address.
Then you assign blogs for text entries and photo entries. In TypePad Plus and Pro, where you can operate more than one blog in the account, you can assign one blog to receive text entries and another blog to receive any pictures you beam over. The final piece of the puzzle is a special e-mail address assigned to your TypePad account to receive all remote entries the details. Audioblogging with Audioblog without opening another program. It just plays. This system is an advantage over Blogger’s audioblogging service which connects the audio to the blog but opens a program such as Windows Media Player or iTunes to play the audio. Audioblog is not free, but it works with many blog programs and provides a better experience for your visitors. Audioblog is not the place to start a blog. The service places audio content on a blog you already operate.
You need these numbers to record a voice entry over the phone. You might want to print this page. I also have the phone number in my
cell phone’s address book, so I can post an audio blog entry anytime, anywhere. After you reach this stage, you’re ready to audioblog. Follow the instructions on the page displaying your personal numbers. You need the four-digit number that identifies your blog; it appears next to your blog’s name on that page. So now you can unfold your phone at any time and post a voice entry that just about any visitor can effortlessly hear. If you did the Flickr routine described earlier in this chapter, you can also post photos remotely, perhaps using the same cell phone. How cool is all this? I’ll answer that; on a scale of one to ten it maxes out at ten. This is great stuff. The step-throughs in this chapter might seem long and complicated, but they are worth it. Set aside some time and take them slowly. When you’re all set up, the actual photoblogging, moblogging, and audioblogging become as easy as making a phone call.
Multiple millions of blog entries. Many of those blogckW,ho is linking to whom. How does one keep track of it all? Google? Yahoo!? Sure, those generic search engines do index blog entries and mix them into Web results along with nonblog pages when you run a keyword search. But
the blogosphere has grown so rapidly, and is so rich in content, that an urgent need exists for dedicated blog search engines. That need has been met by sev- eral engines that collect only blog content. In addition to traditional keywordentry search engines, directories and useful lists have sprung up to help you navigate the oceanic blogosphere and find the writers you want to read.
The credibility of blog engines ebbs and flows quickly, driven by the voracious and demanding nature of the blogosphere. At the time of this writing, PubSub was riding high thanks to the quality of its search results and the ease with which it can be personalized. PubSub gets part of its name from the fact that you can “subscribe” to searches. This tracking feature is not a subscription in any traditional sense; it is free, and you don’t even have to register at the site to use it. That last fact is remarkable in this era of ubiquitous site registrations and contributes to the site’s wildfire popularity.