Here are some of the ways you can build a backchannel for your newsroom today, if not necessarily your beat, without ReportingOn:

The Prologue theme for WordPress

If all you need is a way to bring together short updates by a small, set group of people, put up a WordPress blog on your own server with the Prologue theme in place, or use WordPress.com to host it, especially if everyone involved already has an account there.

You’ll get a front pages with recent updates, user pages with their updates, tags to use for something like “beats” or “projects” or “groups” — plus all the usual bells and whistles for WordPress that are available via plugins. Another feature: As with all WordPress blogs, you can always make it private by throwing a password on it, restricting it to internal use.

Verdict: I like it, and I love WordPress, but this really isn’t the way to make new connections, it’s a project management tool to keep track of what everyone in your office or newsroom or virtual office is working on.

Present.ly

First things first, let’s get this out of the way: This is going to cost you money if you’re going to make it useful to a group of more than five people. But it looks like a very well-designed user interface, with features like a mobile site and an API that uses the Twitter API convention out of the box.

This thing is built for enterprise use, inside a company, to be stable and pleasant to work with. That said, again, it costs money. $14/month gets you 15 users, $39 gets you 40, $99 gets 100.

Verdict: Pretty, but probably not worth the money unless you need a mobile version of an internal status-sharing tool tomorrow.

Spread the word: related/readit

Read the rest of this entry »

Google has rolled out a new version of homepage customizer iGoogle. They say they’ve rolled it out to all U.S. users, but that would include me, and I have seen no signs of it on my page, so apparently “all” is a little strong. Hopefully I will be included soon, because being a fan of iGoogle, I would find the new features quite useful.

The biggest of those features is the “canvas view” that comes with it, which allows you to view the contents of some gadgets without leaving the iGoogle page. For example with the old version if you want to look at your gmail account from iGoogle, you can see your inbox, but if you click on a message you will be directed to the actual page at Gmail. From what I understand (I’m still awaiting testing for myself) you will now be able to read your messages without leaving the page you’re on. They have incorporated this ability with a variety of different iGoogle gadgets.

Another key feature of the new version is the left navigation, which will allow you to get to any gadget from an organized menu on the left side of your iGoogle homepage (as seen in the screenshot below. This is a huge improvement in design as far as I’m concerned, because it stands now, I have rearranged the gadgets around my page i don’t know how many times, and can still not really come up with an organization that I really like (and have to look around for a while to find them sometimes). Having a navigation menu on the left with a canvas view for gadgets will be much more convenient.

I only hope that the gadget developers crank out the canvas view compatibility so the number of supported gadgets increases quickly. Google expects them to. First though, I’d just like to be able to see my own version of the new iGoogle.

Spread the word: related/readit

Source: Web Pro News

It’s been said links are the currency of the Web, and an honest-gotten inbound link is like a tip for good work. Locating broken inbound links, then—links attempted but because of an error don’t connect with a page on your site—is like an opportunity to locate missing money.

Google recently introduced a feature to its webmaster portal that can be like a metal detector on the beach. The tool allows webmasters to view a list of 404 errors generated from broken inbound links.

Obviously, fixing these links can help improve your ranking in the search results. The Googlebot tries to crawl those links from other sites, but when it arrives it has no where to go, and you don’t get credit for that link. Plus, visitors get a bad experience with your site, also something you don’t want.

Matt Cutts gives a nice tutorial about how to reclaim those lost links, beginning with how to download a list of 404 pages and links to them through the webmaster portal:

“It would be trivial to mail some of these people and say ‘Hey, I noticed you linked to my site (thank you!) but the link is broken, so users will get a 404 page. Would you mind changing your link on page A to point to the right page, which is url B?’ When the other site fixes their link, their visitors find your site directly, plus all search engines can follow those links and give you credit for them. Converting 404 links to links to the right pages converts sucky links to free direct text links for all.

In the comments, someone asks about 301 redirects, which Cutts doesn’t seem confident in recommending. He replied, “I purposefully left out the ‘301-to-the-home-page’ issue from my post, because there are pros and cons. The pro is that you don’t have to ask other people to fix their links (and as long as you’re doing this in a normal way, you shouldn’t run into problems with Google), but the downside is that it’s a really weird user experience for your visitors.”

If you know the intent of the link, though, perhaps you could 301 to the intended page, or even, though it’s more work, create new content for that erring link.

However you deal with the problem, it’s definitely like finding a $20 bill in a coat you haven’t worn since last winter.

Spread the word: related/readit

Source: Web Pro News