I haven't been here for a while, I think between working with customers and trying to get along with everything else that life throws at us, alas, the blog suffered!

Anyway, we are now back on blog and I have spent today refreshing the look of it. We have also dropped the Beginning Internet Marketing branding and we will gradually bring both our website and this blog in line with our new 24-7 Branding. Hey cool, can't wait for that!

Ok, so for now I'll keep it short and will work on some material for you all in the coming days. Let me know if you want anything specific discussed.

Until the next time!

Graham

Have you ever added a comment on somebody's blog, just to find it removed or never pass the authors screening?

Most bloggers want to see comments on their posts, but they want to see related ones. We spend a while each day clearing the deluge of bogus and automated comments in a hope, an almost desperate hope, that one may be serious.

The fact is many Internet Marketers see blogs as being a quick and easy way of growing links to there own blogs and websites. However, most blogs instruct search engines not to follow comment links (see our post on no-follow mechanics). So they are, to a certain extent, wasting their time.

Having said this, adding related and relevant comments helps you build rapport with the author and over time you may be able to leverage the relationship to your advantage. Perhaps the blogger may post some information about you or your company, they may consider you when carrying out other day-to-day business activity. You can look at the comments section of a blog as an opportunity to network.   

So here are some guidelines;

1. Always read the article first!
2. Always read the article first! (No, this is not a mistake, we want to be sure you get what we're saying here.)
3. OK, now that you have read the article, think about what interested you about it and make some notes. Did you agree or disagree with the post? Do you have any thoughts that may extend or improve the information within the post?
4. Now write a sentence or short paragraph about your thoughts. Don't just compliment the author on how great she is, that's just annoying!
5. Use your name in your comment, not your company name or the keywords you want to be known for. This is a sure fore way of getting your comments deleted really quickly.
6. Always use your real email address. Most blogs don’t publish your email address, and using free Gmail and Hotmail email addresses is sure to make the author think very carefully about keeping your post active or not.

It seams like everywhere you look online nowadays, all you find are widgets!

So you may well ask "What the hell's a widget?"

Above is dictionary.com interpretation of the word, but in the realm of social media its idea is, well, anything really! Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in and Google all provide widgets of one sort or another.

Most of the time a widget is a small component of a web page. It's a piece of code developed by one company/website which is then run on many other websites in a hope to allow visitors to connect easier. For example, on our blog you’ll find 2 widgets we are using, one of them is a Twitter re-tweet button and the other is a Facebook share button.

These work in much the same way as most social media widgets work, they are small HTML & Javascript snippets of code your web designer can simply drop onto your pages and off you go. You're using a widget!

However, the plethora of widgets available just seams to be a little overwhelming and in many cases completely useless and unnecessary. I can imagine in many companies trying to tap into the social media market, the directors sit around a table together with the designers and developers and they say "We have to make it different and stand out in the crowd, any ideas?" to which some bright spark says, "I know, lets create a widget!"

I may sound a little negative here, but I’m trying not to be, honest. Just create widgets with purpose! So I have listed a few of our favourites below, please feel free to comment and let us know yours also.

Re-Tweet Button: http://tweetmeme.com
Facebook Share: http://facebook.com & http://www.fbshare.me
Social Networking Components by Google Friends Connect http://www.google.com/friendconnect
RSS & ATOM Feeds: http://feedburner.google.com
Gravatars (Used in blog comments etc.) http://en.gravatar.com 

The Google Wave is gathering momentum and the beta testers are having quite a ride. The question is what and how can the Wave be leveraged by business users? Firstly take a look at this superb video which contains strong language but does demonstrate the Waves amazing functionality of the search mega giants embrace of social media.

Wow, the system is a fully integrated media extravaganza, with the ability to pull in images, movies, sound clips, background tracks and multiple format text. The user can start multiple waves (conversations) and select participants by their wave avatar (image or photo) and then start collaborating.

The end result is a single platform which looks like it can be used by business, not only for marketing, but customer support, project management, quick internal and external conversations, the list just goes on.

Many dispersed workforces have been using chat-room technology to connect quickly for quite sometime, but the interactivity is normally limited to some text and a smiley :o). Recently with Facebook and Twitter, some have started to use these slightly richer platforms to perform the same tasks. However, the very real and rich components of The Wave may well be so compelling that business once again migrates to the better platform.

From a marketing perspective, the Wave will need to encourage the same mass buy-in as Facebook and Twitter. Googles Friend Connect hasn't yet hit the big time but we are sure The Wave is going to hit much harder.

Would you walk into a crowded room, filled with people you didn't know and shout out "Hey, anyone want to tell me their life story?" I guess the answer would be no.

However, online the request for comment is significant and also expected to a certain extent. It's difficult to know why people don't see a difference, but this is our take on the subject. Obviously, feel free to share your comments (ha ha he he)!

Firstly, most regular online activity is more conversational, long gone are the days of simple static pages. We are in the age of social networking and this is all about expression and collective discussion. Therefore you have to have an outlet for these dialogues and the perfect way to do this is through comments, feedback, RSS feeds etc.

The next part is about developing a community, this takes time as people, lets face it, don't necessarily trust everyone else just because they say they are trustworthy. So encouraging readership is done through promoting discussion. Hence the request for comment.

Above we added a very soft request for comment, did you spot it? However, you don't have to be so reserved, you can just write an entire post dedicated to requesting comments. See todays post at Daily Blog Tips and see how they have proactively focused an entire blog post on getting readers to comment. It worked too, at the time of writing this, they were up to 32 comments. I think these include some replies from the author but still, a great response in less than a day.

Give it a try, ask for comments in your posts or write a post dedicated to getting comments! If you do, let us know and we'll sure get the ball rolling for you. All you have to do, you guessed it, is post a comment here and ask!

Happy days everyone!

BlogEngine.Net is very cool! One of the best things about it is an integrated Ping service. A ping service allows your blog to inform syndication services around the Internet that you have new content. It's a bit like saying "Hello World, something interesting here for you to see!"

Anyway, we have been looking around for a list of ping services for a while now and we stumbled upon Mads Kristensen post here. Now the Ping service class that Mads provides here is already available in the current version of BlogEngine.Net, but at the very bottom of his post is a link to a gem of a post.

As always, we like to share! This post provides a nice big list of Ping services, we haven't checked them out fully, but the post is here, take a look and include them in your blogs ping service. Blog Ping Services.

So, the blog is up and running!

We have our designers coming up with some ideas and we are looking at developing some widgets also. We did have a bit of a, well, aggravating time today. Mainly this was down to installation and the fact we forgot all about .NET as a whole. I guess this happened because we were installing a pre-built application and didn't think about this stuff. Anyway, to get to the point, here is a few gotchas to keep in mind.

Don't forget who's running your new Blog site!

If your hosting your new blog with a shared hosting provider, you must ensure that your App_Data folder has Read/Write permissions set to it. This will ensure that you can add posts, change settings etc.

If, like us, you are running on dedicated machines, you need to look at your application pool under IIS 6/7 and check the Identity of the process running the website. To do this follow these steps;

1. Open the properties of your new blog website by right clicking the website icon and selecting properties;
2. Select the Home Directory tab and make a note of the Application Pool at the bottom of this window. Click Cancel to dismiss the website properties;
3. Expand the Application Pools folder and right click the pool you previously noted;
4. Select the Identity tab. In here it will display the security account which is running your new blog.

Once you have the account which is running the application pool, you need to grant this user Read/Write permissions on the App_Data folder. The BlogEngine.net website discusses adding permissions to the ASPNET user which is correct for your development machine or localhost, however in IIS 6/7 this is unlikely to be the case.

Let me know if you need any further help on this.

Hey, .NET 1.1 don't get so upset!

So we have copied our blog to the server and setup a bog standard website in IIS 6. Then, hold on! everything stopped working! Hey BlogEngine.Net, thats not fair, whats going on?

Then we remembered, we have .NET 1.1 applications running and we setup the new website in the same application pool. The key thing here to remember is to setup your new website along with a dedicated application pool if you have multiple applications running. Then again, it doesn't need to be dedicated, it can be shared across applications as long as they are running the same version of .NET. Make sense?

Here's a few links that may help also on these issues and more.

• Complete Installation Video for BlogEngine.net
• Installation Query in Discussions

Have fun, its a great solution, well done chaps!