Mobile App Blogging Thanks to Posterous: Regator vs MeeHive vs Byline

On August 19, 2009, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

If you haven’t noticed, I like Posterous. I think they may have single handedly made email relevant for me again. Here’s my Posterous blog. I also like using tools in ways they weren’t meant to be used. That’s the case with this post. Please note that none of these apps were designed for mobile blogging so my review of them is completely irrelevant to the real reason people made them.

The main way I use Posterous is for mobile blogging. If I’m at me desk I’d just as soon use Windows Live Writer with the Zemanta plugin. Most of my mobile blogging is done from Byline. Byline is an amazing app that synchs with Google Reader making my RSS feeds portable. Byline is my secret weapon for reading hundreds of blog posts a day. But Byline has another cool feature: Mail Link to this Page. The mail a link option in many mobile news readers turns them into a mobile blogging app thanks to Posterous.

Last night Louis Gray turned me on to two new apps. Regator and MeeHive.

My problem with Byline is that it’s a little ugly for blogging. Heck it’s even a little ugly for an email. The link it sends is the feed proxy link not the Web URL or permalink.

My typical process is to copy and paste a section of the post, then select the email a link option. This redirects me to the iPhone’s mail program which I have linked to my Gmail account. I then paste the pull quote, edit the message of the email, which is the title of post and usually add a sentence or two of my own thinking.

Bellow is a screen shots of a post I did with Byline. As you can see the link at the end of the article is kind of ugly.

Byline

Byline2

It’s a little dirty but it works. Posterous is even kind enough to convert wordpress.com into a link even though I didn’t send it over than way.

Next are two quick posts done with MeeHive and Regator:

MeeHive

MeeHive1

Regator

Regator2

Regator wins hands down for pretty links. Even if you’re only sending an email and not blogging it seems like a hyperlink would be nicer to get than a raw proxy link. Granted if they view email in plain text then it will separate the link out anyway but it can’t be any worse.

MeeHive did a cool thing though when I highlighted text it inserted that into the email. That was cool.

No real conclusion here, I’ll continue to use whatever app I’m in to do quick blogs but I have to wonder if, as blogging continues to get easier, this is something app builders will need to take into account.

Anyone else out there mobile blog? Any tips or tricks?

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Marketers as Aggregators Creators and Distributors

On June 25, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

As I get ready to call it a day and I reflect back on all the content I created (I’m sure I’ll have several less subscribers tomorrow), I’m struck by the importance of workflow.

People think that 2 or 3 blog posts is hard. It’s really not. I didn’t create that much new content that I wasn’t going to create anyway. What you read today was content from emails, social bookmarking and tweets. What was original content was expanded thoughts building off of that content or heated, in the moment thoughts as I discovered something new or thought provoking.

I’ve also posted using multiple tools. I’ve used Windows Live Writer and Scribefire, both with the Zemanta plugin. I’ve posted text, pictures and audio. I’ve used the WordPress blog interface, Diigo and Gmail via Posterous (right now I’m writing on my iTouch in Gmail). In addition to the content you see here there were also posts to the Studio D WaggEd blog, posts on Posterous that didn’t make it hear and a post to my Tumblr blog. Plus I have 3 posts already for tomorrow.

And I did all this with a full day of client meetings and still getting deliverables done on time.

I do all this not because I think you are all that interested in my every thought (actually I think I over did it today) but because I know that other than strategic thinking the ability to create and distribute targeted, real time content will be marketers #1 most needed skillset. #2 is the ability to teach that to others. And the only way to do that is to know the tools and they aren’t word processors and presentation decks.

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WHOA!!! Zemanta now integrates with Gmail and Ymail. Holy Crap That’s Cool!

On February 5, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

This was the title of my tweet after Zemanta upgraded the latest version on their FireFox plugin. All of a sudden there was a new button in my Gmail.

I’ve raved about Zemanta before. I think it is a very cool product. For me it demonstrates some of the early potential of semantic data.While some may not see the immediate benefit of Zemanta for blogging let alone email this is a service to seriously watch. They are a smart group of guys with smart investors with a service that is only going to continue to get better.

Clicking on the ‘Add Zemanta’ button brought up the very familiar Zemanta sidebar.

Also immediately below each email is the most valuable part of the Add Zemanta functionality; links. Based on your content Zemanta will suggest links to home pages of companies that you mention, links to Wikipedia entries and even links to maps of locations you mention. This im my opinion is the biggest benefit of adding Zemanta content in an email because it’s a huge time saver.

The photo’s and links to blog posts is more of a nice to have and could be valuable if you were building email marketing messages especially since you can add your own Amazon affiliate link to Zemanta, which will suggest Amazon items based on your content.

It would be really nice if you could set your content preferences to be different based on email vs blog. I would like Zemanta to pull almost exclusively from my personal content for emails whereas I prefer it to pull from my wider content network for blog posts.

I think this could also be really interesting for people who use a service like Posterous or Tumblr where you can post via email. I may finally start an account with one of these services just to play around with it.

Given the fact that Zemanta works with the powerful Microsoft blog editor Windows Live Writer, I have to wonder how long until we see a Zemanta for Outlook?

If you use FireFox and you blog Zemanta is a very cool product. If you don’t blog but you use Gmail or Y!mail then you too can enjoy the benefits of semantic data. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

 

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Tools I Use – Zemanta

On November 26, 2008, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

Image representing Zemanta as depicted in Crun...

Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase

It’s been a while since I wrote about the latest Web 2.0 or blogging tools that I use, and there are a bunch of new ones.  The latest and greatest Blog tool I’ve been using is Zemanta.

If you’ve been a regular follower of my blog you’ll have noticed the links in the bottom of my posts and a *Reblog* button.

I don’t remember who’s blog I first saw Zemanta on but I started using it a while ago and have really enjoyed the extra layer of information and ease it adds to my blogging.

I use Zemanta on all of my blogs, even the ones at HP, where I just coordinate the actual blog posting for some of our VP’s

The Zemanta Plugins

WLW Zemanta

I use a blog editor almost every time I write a blog post.  My editor of choice was originally Windows Live Writer but after a while I started using ScribeFire, especially for shorter posts.  When Zemanta first came out as a FireFox plugin, I would write my post in ScribeFire, save it as a draft in WordPress and then open WordPress and make a few final tweaks using Zemanta.  It was an extra step but I found it worth it.

But when Zemanta came out with a Windows Live Writer plugin this sealed the deal and brought me back to my once beloved Windows only blog editor (seriously it’s one of the main reasons I don’t completely switch to Linux for personal use).

Zemanta shows up in a right hand panel in WLW (see screen grab to the right). It offers links to Wikipedia, home pages and maps. It also makes it easy to add links to other related blog articles from around their network as well as Creative Commons images.  All of these are simple to use, just click on any object and Zemanta automatically embeds the object in your post. Very slick.

If you don’t use Windows Live Writer, besides the FireFox plugin they also have an Internet Explorer plugin.

I Love Links

Way back in the early dawn of blogging having a lot of links in your post (ones that didn’t just link to your own posts that is) was a good thing. It’s a rare post of mine that doesn’t have at least 5 links in it.  Oh sure your SEO’s out there will tell you that your giving up valuable Google juice, but who cares.

Zemanta makes it easy to add links to Wikipedia, as well as Amazon. If you have an affiliate account with Amazon it will even add the code needed into the link.  I especially love the related articles by Zemanta. I don’t know why but I really enjoy offering additional resources not related to my blog.

I Love Pictures

Over the last 6 months I have really tried to make more liberal use of photos. It just makes blogs more fun to read.  Zemanta makes this easy as well. Zemanta pulls in tons of images from Flickr and Wikipedia. If you have your own Flickr account it will even pull your photos into its suggestions.

Just Plain Cool

I had a chance to meet some of the Zemanta guys at BlogWorld, and then again at Defrag.

I found out that Zemanta originally started off as a service for matching related articles inside a large media company in Eastern Europe. They have recently received VC funding from Fred Wilson’s firm and continue to announce cool new partnerships with other cool Web 2.0 companies.

After talking with the guys it became obvious to me that besides just blogging there are a lot of applications inside the Enterprise, but I’m sure that’ll come later.

Zemanta is totally free. I’m not sure what their revenue model will be. It seems like some sort of freemium model will make the most sense or maybe they’ll enter the Enterprise sooner than later. Either way, I’m a big fan and I wish them the best of luck.

If you want to try Zemanta without having to download or install anything just hit the reblog button on the bottom of this post, go ahead you know you want to.

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Chris Finke: the keeper of the blogging flame [Interview]

On April 28, 2008, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

I’m a huge fan of ScribeFire and with every new update it keeps getting better. Since switching to Ubuntu Linux on my personal laptop I find myself using SribeFire almost exclusively.

I’ve been using ScribeFire off and on since it was originally the Performancing blogging plugin for FireFox. SInce it became ScribeFire I was never really sure who was running it these days. I did a little homework (it wasn’t that hard) and discovered that Chris Finke was the driving force behind ScribeFire these days.

I’d like to thank Chris for taking the time to answer a few questions and encourage all of you who blog to
A) make sure you’re using FireFox and
B) get the ScribeFire blog editor.

So who is Chris Finke?

I’m a 24 year-old software developer from Minnesota, married, out of college, and I work full-time for Mahalo.com.

How long have you been working on ScribeFire?

I’ve been involved with ScribeFire since February of 2007, or about 14 months.

Were you involved in the original development?

No, I took over on the project after the original developer, Jed Shaw, abandoned it, due to lack of time, I suppose.

How did ScribeFire end up being separated from Performancing?

When the Performancing.com/ PayPerPost deal was initiated, Performancing split off the blog editor as ScribeFire, since it wasn’t something that PayPerPost was interested. (Note that this happened shortly before I became involved with the project, so I don’t have any more details than that.)

(For those of you not familiar with the Performancing/PayPerPost deal you can read more here. Long story short: It didn’t go through but Performancing did get purchased by Splashpress Media.)

Are you the only one working on Scribefire?

No; in addition to the work that I do, there are several other developers that contribute patches and help with issue tracking (Evan and Alaa, specifically), as well as about a dozen translators, and of course, all of the users that submit feedback and bug reports.

You also do dev for Mahalo right?

Yes, I’ve worked for Mahalo since November of 2007.

Is that tough doing both projects?

It takes a lot of time, but since I’d choose to work on open-source software in my free time anyway, it’s not a stretch for me to make working on ScribeFire my hobby-programming, and working on Mahalo my work-programming.

Any other projects you have going on?

I’ve always got a handful of projects going, although none of them are currently demanding the same time commitment as ScribeFire: I’ve written 10 other Firefox extensions that I update occasionally, a few Wordpress plugins, and I do some contract Firefox extension work on the side. (The Compete Toolbar was one of mine originally, but I believe that they’ve hired someone fulltime to update it.)

What are the plans for ScribeFire longterm? Any up-n-coming features we should be looking forward to?

We just released the Quickblogging toolbar – a way to quickly update your blog posts with pictures, videos, quotes, and links. I see ScribeFire’s future as making it as easy as possible to update and edit content. Any features that help with that will certainly make an appearance.

Do you ever see a point where it might become it’s own stand alone app, or being integrated into other browsers?

It certainly couldn’t be integrated with a browser like Internet Explorer without thousands of hours of work – the platforms are just too different. It is possible, however, that it could be made into its own app via Mozilla’s XULRunner platform, but that’s not currently in our plans for the near-future.

Are you happy with ScribeFire?

I’d say so. The community behind it is great and very opinionated, and it’s definitely the best blog editor for Firefox. I don’t know if it’s the best blog editor period, but it’s our plan to make it that.

If you don’t run Windows then I would argue that ScribeFire is the best blog editor available to you.

I’ve mentioned before how I use the ScribFire blog editor. When I wrote that post Windows Live Writer was my main blog editor. Today I only use WLW at work when I have a larger post to format and I’m pulling together on and off line content.

I really like the convenience of ScribeFire’s in-browser editor and it has 90% of the functionality of WLW. If you use flickr and YouTube for your photo’s and videos you should definitely be using ScribeFire since the new Quickblogging toolbar makes adding those to your blog post a snap.

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