Florida is raising eyebrows with a bill that would require anyone blogging about the state’s elected officials to register or face fines.
According to NBC affiliate WFLA, Florida Senator Jason Brodeur has proposed a new bill that would force bloggers writing about the “the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, a Cabinet officer, or any member of the Legislature” to register with the state and file monthly reports if they receive compensation for what they write.
The bill goes on to say that the bill “does not include the website of a newspaper or other similar publication,” but reading the bill’s text leaves tremendous room for interpretation and does not definitively rule out any type of news coverage.
What’s more, the bill doesn’t even limit its scope to bloggers within the state of Florida:
“Blogger” means any person as defined in s. 1.01(3) that submits a blog post to a blog which is subsequently published.
“Blog post” is an individual webpage on a blog which contains an article, a story, or a series of stories.
The bill then outlines a schedule of monthly reports bloggers would be subject to:
If a blogger posts to a blog about an elected state officer and receives, or will receive, compensation for that post, the blogger must register with the appropriate office, as identified in paragraph (1)(f), within 5 days after the first post by the blogger which mentions an elected state officer.
Upon registering with the appropriate office, a blogger must file monthly reports on the 10th day following the end of each calendar month from the time a blog post is added to the blog, except that, if the 10th day following the end of a calendar month occurs on a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday, the report must be filed on the next day that is not a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday.
Failure to comply would lead to some hefty fines:
A fine of $25 per day per report for each day late, not to exceed $2,500 per report.
It seems that Senator Brodeur may need a primer on the First Amendment and how it applies to bloggers, as well as all news coverage in general. In the meantime, it’s highly unlikely such a law — if the bill even passes — would ever survive a legal challenge.
Medium announced that it is introducing a new browsing and reading experience, which it refers to as Collections. The goal is (of course) to make it easier to find content of interest on a personalized basis.
The feature is for both iOS and Android and integrates your own interest with “explorable threads of content” and “diverse viewpoints” across various topics.
Medium’s Katie Zhu explains, “Our new home experience is powered by a feature called Collections. The top list of sections on our home screen will be a mix of popular verticals (like Politics or Culture) and more specific, timely events (think the Oscars or Apple vs. the FBI). You’ll be able to find new Collections in these sections every day, curated by Medium and a handful of trusted testers—for now. If you’re interested, you can also read about our curation principles. Collections are homes for topic or theme-based content from Medium and beyond — they will allow users to bring together Medium stories, people and publications to follow, as well ideas from the rest of the web.”
“We believe that in order to create a great reading experience for humans, other humans should be part of that process,” she adds. “There’s a unique sensibility that individual curators bring, whether that’s a specific tone, voice, or simply good taste. They can help act as a filter for readers in guiding our limited time and attention to things that matter, calling out stories that haven’t yet been seen by many, helping to easily showcase the big stories of the day, or sometimes just adding a dose of weird and wonderful.”
For now, the experience is only open to a small group of people, but it will become available to all in time. You can stay updated by getting on the interest list.
On Friday, Google took to multiple company blogs to lay out a few “best practices” for bloggers and companies when it comes to the ladder giving the former free products, and the former reviewing them.
These are to keep you compliant with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and therefore in the search engine’s good grace (i.e. not penalized).
The first rule (and this is not new, mind you) is to make sure that links are properly nofollowed.
“Links that pass PageRank in exchange for goods or services are against Google guidelines on link schemes,” Google says. “Companies sometimes urge bloggers to link back to: the company’s site; the company’s social media accounts; an online merchant’s page that sells the product; a review service’s page featuring reviews of the product the company’s mobile app on an app store.”
“Bloggers should use the nofollow tag on all such links because these links didn’t come about organically (i.e., the links wouldn’t exist if the company hadn’t offered to provide a free good or service in exchange for a link),” it adds. “Companies, or the marketing firms they’re working with, can do their part by reminding bloggers to use nofollow on these links.”
The other two best practices are pretty simple. Disclose the relationship, and “create compelling, unique content.”
For disclosure, Google says this can appear anywhere in a post, but that the top is the most useful placement.
Again, none of this stuff is really new, but it’s worth noting that Google is posting this on multiple blogs. The company could be looking at this stuff more closely than in the past.
Last month, everyone that publishes content on the Internet got some big news. Facebook said it would open up Instant Articles to all on April 12. This week, Facebook announced a WordPress plugin, which should make it much easier for many, many site and blog owners to implement.
Do you publish with WordPress? Do you intend to take advantage of Facebook’s Instant Articles? Discuss.
What Instant Articles Are
Instant Articles first emerged about a year ago when Facebook let a handful of big publications like The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and National Geographic take advantage of testing the format, which involves Facebook hosting content to show to users in a quicker, more user-friendly manner on mobile devices.
Using the same technology it uses to load photos and videos quickly in its mobile app, Facebook says Instant Articles load as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles. They also come with some content feature options like tilt-to-pan photos, auto-play videos, embedded audio captions, and interactive maps.
What You Can Do With Instant Articles
You can sell ads in their articles and keep the revenue and/or use Facebook’s Audience Network to monetize unsold inventory.
When it comes to content and audience analytics, Instant Articles supports comScore attribution, and you can use their existing analytics systems or providers like Google Analytics or Omniture. The company is also in talks with European attribution and measurement providers.
Facebook also lets you track reader-engagement with its own analytics tools. In addition to aggregate activity data, it provides info on article reach and engagement, time spent in each article, scroll-depth and engagement with rich media assets like photos and videos.
Over the past year, Facebook has given more and more sites the ability to use Instant Articles, and the articles only recently became supported on Android alongside iOS.
In a month, any content site big or small will be able to publish them.
When Instant Articles opens up to all next month, those using standard WordPress templates will be able to activate the plugin to create Instant Articles.
The plugin is open source, so the developer community will be able to participate in its continued development. WordPress discusses the plugin more here.
Instant Articles Mean More Shares, What About Reach?
According to Facebook, Instant Articles get more shares. Instant Articles product manager Michael Reckhow recently told Nieman Lab:
It’s really early in terms of understanding how people interact with Instant Articles, and we’ll continue to learn a lot. But the first thing we’re seeing is that people are more likely to share these articles, compared to articles on the mobile web, because Instant Articles load faster; the majority load in under a second, and that means people are getting to the content immediately.
We believe that sharing is the strongest signal that someone can give that it was a great experience. We’re really happy to see that improving the speed, improving the experience inside the article, is being reflected in more shares.
According to Reckhow at the time, most of those using Instant Articles were planning to put their entire catalog or at least the majority of it on the platform.
Facebook says using Instant Articles won’t directly help you in the News Feed ranking and organic reach, but you see what he said about sharing being the strongest signal, and Facebook does seem to favor Facebook videos over YouTube videos. Facebook would no doubt love to show more Facebook-hosted content.
For a lot of businesses, getting, maintaining, and especially growing engagement on social media is an ongoing struggle. Throughout this struggle, however, many seem to have forgotten about how big of a part their blogs can play.
TrackMaven released some interesting findings in its Content Marketing Paradox Revisited report, which analyzed 12 months worth of marketing activity from nearly 23,000 brands and 50 million pieces of content across all major industries on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and blogs.
This amounted to a combined total of 75.7 billion interactions. In other words, it covers a pretty broad scope.
Overall, it found that marketers are producing more content with less return. While output of content rends upward, engagement trends downward.
“From the highest to lowest points, the output of content per brand increased 35 percent per channel across 2015, but content engagement decreased by 17 percent,” writes TrackMaven’s Kara Burney. “And most interestingly, when output per brand peaked in October 2015, engagement levels look the sharpest downturn.”
“In short: This is content overload, quantified,” she adds. “As more content floods social networks, the slice of engagement for the average brand shrinks. With a limit to how much content can be consumed, liked, or shared, brands must create their own competitive advantages with distinguishing content.”
The study found that content output per brand increased most on Twitter and Facebook (60% and 31% year-over-year, respectively). Engagement fell across most major social networks, and fell most drastically on Pinterest. Twitter was the exception with a slight increase in engagement over the past year.
For those paying, the average engagement ratio for brand on Facebook is three times higher than on Twitter, the report says.
Overall, Instagram has the highest average engagement ratio for brands, and it’s a great deal higher than all of the other networks. Still, engagement levels there are quickly sinking:
Here’s a look at how much content brands are creating for each network:
Perhaps the most important takeaway from the study is that brands are perhaps too caught up in social channels with diminishing returns while neglecting an important and effective platform – the trusty old blog.
“In contrast to the results on social, the average number of blogs per brand per month actually decreased by 16 percent across the year to a low of 58. Engagement with brand blogs, however, held steady, even climbing slightly to a peak of 190.7 average social shares per post in July 2015,” the report says. “For marketers, this finding serves as a reminder not to neglect the basics in pursuit of that shiny social network. New digital platforms will come and go, but for now, the blog remains a reliable content hub from which to build your brand.”
You can find the full report here. It gets into how a couple of brands are utilizing their blogs for maximum effectiveness, and taking a channel-specific approach to their social strategies.
myFitnessPal, for example, posts recipes on Pinterest, fitness challenges on its blog, and motivational updates on Facebook.
The most important metric for bloggers in the year ahead will not be their traffic or their page views. It will be their engagement rates. Can the blogger attract readers – no matter the size of the audience – and keep them on the site? Can the blogger create a community, giving readers something to come back for other than just fresh writing and attractive images? Can a blogger press publish and be rewarded with Twitter shares, Facebook posts lauding the content, and the launch of dozens of discussions on social media? And can the blogger remain at the center of all of this?
Whether a small but dedicated niche audience or a community of hundreds of thousands of committed devotees, what will matter for bloggers in 2016 is the engagement rate of that audience – the higher, the better.
Creating blog content alone will not get engagement. You need the traffic to come from somewhere, and the social platforms are certainly a big part of that. As are search and email newsletters.
But the study shows that blog content seems to have taken a backseat to social platforms, when that really shouldn’t be the case.
Medium announced three new publishing features, which it is rolling out this week.
For one, users can now schedule posts with the new “schedule to publish” feature. You can specify the date and time you want a post to be published, bringing Medium more in line with other blogging platforms.
“Clicking on ‘schedule to publish’ from this screen will enable you to queue up stories to be published when you want instead of when you have the time,” Medium says on its official blog. “You can now set your schedule to publish at peak traffic times and reward your followers with a steady stream of new material released on a more regular basis.”
The second new feature lets you connect your Twitter account to your Medium blog. Your Twitter followers who have Medium accounts will automatically become followers of your publication. You can set it up from your publication’s about page.
The third feature is the ability to view stats for letters sent through Medium publications. You’ll see these when you go the Letters page of your publication.
DigiDay has a very interesting report out indicating that LinkedIn has made some changes that enable publishers to get more traffic.
Last summer, publisher traffic from LinkedIn (which used to be a fairly good traffic generator for some) took a nosedive. This occurred while LinkedIn was pushing itself as more of a publisher platform (which it still does).
According to the report, however, LinkedIn has made some tweaks to its Pulse news reader that have turned into traffic spikes for some.
“LinkedIn did not return requests for comment, but publishers say that the changes are a result of a series of tweaks made to Pulse, LinkedIn’s news aggregation app. In November, it added a feature called ‘universal links,’ which loaded Pulse articles within the app rather than sending readers to the mobile Web,” DigiDay’s Ricardo Bilton writes. “That feature, coupled with the publisher recommendation feature LinkedIn added last September, have made it easier for Pulse users to find and read publisher content. Pulse has been downloaded 1.2 million times since last August, according to Apptopia.”
According to Bilton, Forbes saw a 127% increase in LinkedIn traffic from July to December, with the biggest spike happening in December almost overnight. The Financial Times and Business Insider saw similar patterns, he says. He also cites data from Parsely, which found a significant increase in LinkedIn referrals to publishers on its network.
Of course it’s one thing for LinkedIn to send more traffic to big well-known publishers, but how does this apply to you? Well, nothing is certain, but you can get into Pulse, and that means you do have a shot at getting some blog traffic out of this.
Your content can appear in Pulse if you have a blog and include the LinkedIn InShare button, which you can acquire here.
If you represent a publication such as The New York Times or CNN.com or have an external blog, you’re considered a publisher. A publisher’s content can be featured on Pulse when there’s an InShare button on the website All the news articles featured on LinkedIn – the homepage module, Pulse, Channels and email updates – are powered by what members are sharing on the network. Without the InShare widget, content is invisible to the algorithms that parse and distribute the right headlines to the right professionals.
Note that you must have an “external” blog, which means a blog that is hosted outside of your website.
LinkedIn to fulfill the requirements of the above, you must add the InShare widget to your site to enable members to share your content on LinkedIn, and recommends reading through the below SlideShare deck and using a Company Page to build an audience of followers on LinkedIn.
John White, the Chief Marketing Officer at The Good Men Project has some advice for getting an article Featured on Pulse. He writes:
Having your article featured on LinkedIn’s Pulse greatly enhances your distribution range. It can be the difference between getting a few hundred views on your article to getting tens of thousands of views. I have heard many people comment on this topic and give their opinion as to what they think the secret is to getting featured. The fact of the matter is nobody knows for sure the exact formula behind the algorithms for Pulse, except for the mad scientists at LinkedIn. So, while I don’t have an exact answer to this burning hot question within the LinkedIn publishing community, I CAN tell you what has worked for me to get featured 80 times.
First and foremost, choose a topic that is relatable to your followers. The more organic viewers, comments, likes, and shares you get on your article substantially increases your chances of getting featured. If your goal is to get featured, the topic must also align with one of the Pulse channels. If you are thinking about writing an article on an advanced technique in basket weaving, it might not get featured in Pulse. There is no basket weaving channel on LinkedIn. I’m not saying don’t write your article on basket weaving. Read why every article on LinkedIn is good. However, if you were to write an article on how you turned a basket weaving business from a small start-up in a developing country into a global enterprise by utilizing organic marketing efforts with little to no investor money into a profitable global organization, you might have a smash hit on Pulse. The point, when choosing a topic to write about ask yourself, what Pulse channel can you envision your article being featured in? If the topic does not fit into one or more of the Pulse channels, chances are it will not be featured.
While he has plenty more advice in his article (which you should read if this topic is of interest to you), another important thing he mentions is tweeting your article with “Tip@LinkedInPulse”.
Obviously, above all else, you have to have the right content.
Do you consider LinkedIn to be a potentially valuable source of referral traffic? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Pinterest announced that it is now letting you embed bigger pins on your website or blog.
You’ve long been able to embed pins, but until now, they’ve been relatively small and frankly not that pleasing to the eye. They would only go 237 pixels wide.
Now there are three sizes available up to 600 pixels wide. The pin widget also automatically adjusts to fit any screen.
“Plus, early tests from Huffington Post have shown that these new larger Pin widgets are more click-worthy,” says Pinterest’s Lauren Frederick. “After giving the larger Pins a try, their clickthrough rates increased by 8x.”
You can check out the widget builder here. You can also embed existing pins by crabbing the code from the three-dot icon on the pin.
In other Pinterest news, the company is tightening the focus of its advertising efforts. While anyone will still be able to advertise via the self-serve platform and marketing partners, the company will only offer its hands-on support and consultation to retailers and consumer goods companies.
The WordPress.com image service, which delivers the images bloggers use in their posts to their audiences, now supports the WebP image format.
With this addition, served images can be reduced by up to 34% in file size compared to a JPEG image of the same quality. This means images will load faster and annoy users less.
Here’s the comparison WordPress provides:
“While WebP isn’t currently supported by all browsers (see the WebP FAQ for more details), you don’t have to worry about anything,” says David Newman on the WordPress.com blog. “We auto-detect which browsers your readers are using to make sure they can enjoy your travel photography, family pictures, or recent illustration work at the best possible quality. Our system will always serve your viewers the best image format at the highest speed possible.”
For more on the format, Google has a study comparing compression between WebP and JPEG here.
Last month, Google announced Accelerated Mobile Pages, a new open source project, which is basically its answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles. Like Instant Articles, the purpose of the project is to enable web pages to load more quickly on mobile devices.
Google announced on Tuesday that it will begin sending traffic to AMP pages in Google search beginning early next year. They didn’t give a specific date, but said they intend to share “more concrete specifics on timing very soon.” Stay tuned for that. It remains to be seen whether or not these pages will get a ranking boost by default, but given Google’s emphasis on the mobile experience, it seems very likely that AMPs will benefit.
“We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously,” Google explained when the project was announced. “We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant—no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using.”
The program utilizes a new open framework called AMP HTML, which is built on existing web technologies, and is aimed at letting websites build light-weight pages.
As far as ranking goes, Danny Sullivan said in a tweet last month that AMP pages won’t rank better because they’re AMP, but noted that Google already rewards speedy pages, so they can still benefit.
Google has already made mobile-friendliness a ranking signal, and the whole point of AMPs is to make for a better mobile experience. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which AMPs aren’t benefiting in rankings.
“Thousands of publishers have expressed interest in AMP since the preview launched with the likes of the BBC, Sankei, New York Times, News Corp, Washington Post and more,” write David Besbris (Vice President of Engineering, Google Search) and Richard Gingras (Head of News, Google) in a blog post. “Since then, many others have committed their support to the project, including R7.com and NZN Group in Brazil; CBS Interactive, AOL, Thrillist, Slate, International Business Times/Newsweek, Al Jazeera America and The Next Web in the US; El Universal and Milenio in Mexico; The Globe and Mail and Postmedia in Canada, as well as many more across the globe. The Local Media Consortium (LMC), a partnership of 70+ media companies collectively representing 1,600 local newspapers and television stations, has also voiced their support.”
The two also announced that Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, DoubleCLick, and AdSense are working within the project’s framework to improve the ad experience for users, publishers, and advertisers. More information on this will come in the near future, they say.
“Ensuring that traffic to AMP articles is counted just like current web articles is also a major focus of the project,” they write. “comScore, Adobe Analytics, Parse.ly and Chartbeat have all stated that they intend to provide analytics for AMP pages within their tools. They have since been joined by many others: Nielsen, ClickTale and Google Analytics. This development is significant for the AMP Project because publishers developing for AMP will not skip a beat in terms of analytics and measurement — analytics for AMP are real time and will work within your existing provider.”
According to Google, there are over 4,500 developers expressing interest in AMP with over 250 contributions of new code, samples, and documentation having been made. Discussions are also underway related to analytics and template features.
With Google Search the mobile experience has been they key narrative throughout 2015, and it looks like that will continue throughout next year, largely driven by AMP.
Has this development been on your radar thus far? What do you think of the project? Discuss.
Automattic announced the launch of a new version of WordPress.com, which it has built from the ground up to let you update pages and respond to comments from a desktop app, manage all blogs and sites from one spot on any device, spend less time on administration/uploading, and find “the best content” people publish with WordPress.
The new WordPress.com includes previously launched features like the new editor, improved stats pages, and a new reader, but now there’s also a new Mac app.
“Use the desktop app to focus on your content and design with no other browser tabs to distract you — or to keep your sites sidelined but accessible,” writes Michelle W. on the WordPress.com news blog. “Build your site anywhere, in whatever way helps you get your best work done: the app is powered by the same technology that runs WordPress.com, creating a seamless experience for publishing and browsing whether you’re in a browser, a mobile app, or the desktop app.”
“And all of WordPress.com, app included, is built with new technologies that are faster and smoother,” she adds. “Use the time you save uploading photos or configuring menus to focus on your magnum opus instead. WordPress.com should be nimble enough to keep up with you, today, tomorrow, and ten years from now — and now it is.”
Apps for Windows and Linux are on the way. You can sign up here to be notified when they become available.
In addition to the new app, the Jetpack plugin now provides self-hosted sites with access to the new publishing and site-building tools and app.
WordPress.com announced that it now has a new editor that’s faster and cleaner. According to the people behind it, it’s fast, responsive, and lets you create posts and pages more quickly both on desktop and mobile.
According to WordPress.com, the new editor includes instant saving and quick sharing. You can easily manage posts regardless of if you have one or multiple blogs and authors. You can access draft posts in a single click, and content is saved automatically.
You can drag/drop photos, music files, documents, and videos into the post or page. There’s also a revamped post calendar to make scheduling easier.
The new editor is available for self-hosted WordPress.org sites as well. It just requires a Jetpack download.
Though many bloggers are looking for more eyes on their content, some might be looking for fewer, if they have a tendency to be the target of abusive trolls.
Now, Tumblr is adding what it calls a “simple layer of privacy to let you better control who gets to see your stuff and who doesn’t.” Starting today, you can choose to hide your blog from the web.
“We’ve built a new toggle for you, Tumblr: Now you can choose whether or not your blog is viewable on the web. If you switch it off, your followers will still be able to see your posts in their dashboards (and like them, and reblog them), but anyone who tries to visit your blog at its URL will just get a big fat 404 error.”
That’s right, Tumblr is giving users the option to make their content only viewable within the Tumblr-sphere.
“Pairs nicely with the block feature,” says Tumblr.
Of course, Tumblr is touting this move as a bonus privacy feature, which to some extent it is. But we’re talking about the same Tumblr that doesn’t let users make their main blogs private.
And I’m not sure that taking people to a 404 error page is the best way to go about this. When I see a 404, I think broken, not private. Right?
WordPress.com has a new action bar, which makes it easier for readers to follow blogs of interest and for bloggers to make changes to their own sites.
If you’re a blog visitor, and you’re on a WordPress.com blog that you’re not yet following, you can click the “Follow” button that appears in the bottom-right hand corner so new posts from that blog will appear in your WordPress.com Reader. If you click on the three dots that appear on the button, you’ll get more options such as the ability to add the blog’s theme to your own blog, copy the shortlink, report the content, or manage the sites that you follow.
If you’re on one of your own pages, you’ll have “Customize” and “Edit” options. You can use these to go to the customizer where you can adjust your site’s appearance, change themes, change settings, etc, or go to Edit to make changes to your actual content.
The action bar will appear on the desktop, tablets, and smartphones. You can minimize it if you don’t like it.
Believe it or not, you can still write notes on Facebook. A relic of the past, Facebook notes have pretty much fallen out of favor with the social networking crowd. This might be the first time you’ve even thought about them in years. Go try to compose a new note on Facebook. Trust me, it’ll take you longer than it should to figure out how to do it.
But it doesn’t look like Facebook has given up on people using the site for longer-form compositions. Notes appears to be getting a revamp.
Compare that to what Notes has looked like for years:
The new Notes looks a lot better – and a lot more modern. Medium, anyone?
The new looks for Notes is not available to all. What do you think? Given its updated look and feel, will people want to blog on Facebook? Status updates can already run up to 60,000 characters – so there’s already some long-form stuff being published on Facebook every day.
But for users that already have a large friend or follower list, Facebook updating a very old feature could provide a new way to get their long-form content shared.
Shareaholic announced that in addition to share counts for its social media share buttons, it now offers the option to display a total share count.
All share buttons powered by the service will now automatically give you he option to showcase the number of total shares, and you can customize it.
“In addition to choosing where you want the total share counter to appear, you can also personalize what you want to call your shares (ex. ‘Shares’, ‘Likes’, ‘Favorites’), and customize the background and font color to match your site’s design perfectly. All for free,” says Shareaholic’s Cameron Seher.
To set it up, log in to your Shareaholic account, go to the Website dashboard, click the settings button, and click the toggle for “Total Share Counts”. From there, you’ll get the options to customize the color of the background and text and the label.
If regular share counts are turned off, the Total Share Counts settings will not display.
Automattic announced a big update to VideoPress, its service that powers videos on WordPress.com and Jetpack-connected self-hosted WordPress sites.
It describes the new generation of VideoPress as “dynamic, responsive, and lightning fast”.
“Out of the box, the new VideoPress is lightweight and responsive for beautiful playback on any screen, from smartphones to desktops,” explains Guillermo Rauch on the WordPress blog. “VideoPress works on all modern browsers and devices, and gives blog and site authors the power to engage their audiences no matter where they are. Not only do videos look amazing on WordPress sites, but you can also embed your videos anywhere on the web — other websites, social media, chat services — by using a permalink or a snippet of code.”
According to the announcement, VideoPress is optimized for speed, taking up far less space. Posts with video content should laod faster, and that should only help blogs in SEO. Search engines do like fast sites. It should help mobile users a great deal too, particularly when their connections aren’t running as well as they’d like.
“The new VideoPress puts your content front and center. The player is ad-free and unbranded to ensure your videos look and feel like an integral part of your website or blog, not like they belong to a third-party video platform. Unlike other video hosting services, VideoPress starts and ends on your video, keeping traffic on your site and giving you full control over the content to which your visitors are exposed.”
There’s also a new feature called “Seek” that lets you skim through videos:
They’ve also made it easier to share and embed videos with new options, including starting playback at specific times, looping, and autoplay:
VideoPress is available under Premium and Business plans.
Automattic released version 4.2 of WordPress, which is named “Powell” after jazz pianist Bud Powell. It’s now available for download/update. The company says its new features are designed to help bloggers communicate and share.
For one, there’s a new “Press This” feature in the tools menu, which you can add to your browser bookmark bar or on your mobile screen. When you have it installed, you can share your content quickly.
The update includes extended character support as well. In a blog post Matt Mullenweg writes:
Writing in WordPress, whatever your language, just got better. WordPress 4.2 supports a host of new characters out-of-the-box, including native Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters, musical and mathematical symbols, and hieroglyphs.
It also includes emoji.
Here’s a look at some additional new features:
Mullenweg gets more into the under the hood stuff in the post.
Embeddable user-generated content has been around for many years now, and it has added a lot of interesting context and value to many articles and blog posts. More types of embeddable content have recently been made available from major web services like Facebook, Twitter, and reddit, so it seemed like a good time to write a post about a bunch of different types of content you can embed in your own posts to make them more interesting.
I’m not saying this will cover all your options, but it certainly gives you quite a few.
Reddit Comments
Reddit announced the ability to embed comments just last week. To use the feature, just go to a comment’s permalink page, click on the “embed” link, and grab the code.
Reddit is a treasure trove of commentary on many subjects, so this feature should be able to add significant value to blog posts. The feature should be priceless for AMAs alone.
Videos are one of the most obvious things to embed, and there’s a ton of video content out there. Just remember it’s not all on YouTube. That said, there’s a ton of great content on YouTube too, and the vast majority can easily be embedded. YouTube has often been called the world’s second largest search engine. That’s because you can search and find content on pretty much any topic. Are you taking advantage of that fact?
While we’re on the subject of video, Facebook just launched video embeds last week at its f8 developer conference. Users have long been able to embed Facebook posts that contain videos, but now, you can just embed the videos themselves. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Facebook is becoming an increasingly popular place for videos. Often these are videos you won’t find on YouTube or anywhere else.
Twitter also recently launched video embeds. Twitter’s native video offering itself is still relatively new, but earlier this month, they added the embed feature, enabling you to embed the video without the tweet, pretty much like Facebook’s offering.
I’m a big fan of the embeddable Twitter widget. It’s a nice way to display the current conversation around any given topic in real time. Just go to your settings, find the widgets section, and hit “create new”. From there, you’ll be able to create one based on a user timeline, a user’s favorites, tweets from a Twitter list, tweets from a particular search or hashtag, or content from collections.
I use the search widgets in articles fairly often. It’s also nice that they’re customizable.
When you’re done, just hit “create,” and you’ll get your embed code.
WhoSay is a great source of content from celebrities, and posts are embeddable. I would go so far as to say this is among the best places to get Tim Daly content.
Getty Images
Another good place to find embeddable celebrity photos as well as other photography is Getty Images. Just make sure you’re using the content they’re specifically offering up for embedding. About a year ago, Getty announced its embed tool, which lets you search through over 50 million images and share them for free, legally.
Actually, they have a pretty good Tim Daly selection too.
Flickr
Flickr is always another viable option for images:
Imgur
As is Imgur:
Giphy
And Giphy:
Slideshare
While you can certainly upload your own content for embedding, as you can with any of these services, there’s a lot of good content at your disposal on SlideShare. This includes nice image slideshows as well as more informative presentations. Slideshows can’t hurt your time on page metric either.
Infographics that companies put out often come with embed codes attached to them. They’re made for people to share on their websites, so this makes it easier to do so.
Scribd
Scribd is good for when you want to embed documents. It’s often used by publications covering lawsuits and other legal proceedings, for example.
Maybe you want to embed some audio. SoundCloud makes this easy.
Spotify
Spotify doesn’t make it quite as easy, but you can still do it. They used let you right-click on a song and get embed code. Now, it looks like you have to use the Play Button generator. To do that, right-click on the song, and copy the URL. Then go to the generator tool, paste the link in where it tells you, and it will give you the code.
As you can see above, the embeds themselves do give you an embed option, so others can grab the code from there.
Google/Bing Maps
You can always embed maps from Google or Bing, should the occasion call for it. For Google, find a place, and click the gear icon at the bottom to get to the embed option.
For Bing, you can find the embed option in the “Share” button at the top.
Flipboard, which turns its users into curators, apparently doesn’t quite see it that way. Editorial director Josh Quittner told The Drum a couple years ago, after the launch of its now fundamental “Magazines” curation feature, “The creator is still more valuable than the curator.”
In other words, the content being curated by Flipboard users has to come from somewhere, and creators can take advantage of that fact and potentially gain traffic from the service. We recently dove into how you can go about doing so, but have since reached out to the company itself for some additional insight. The result was a Q&A with Quittner.
First, he addressed a question about how Filpboard chooses what stories to show users, beyond the personalization that comes with topic, magazine, and profile following.
“When you go to Flipboard, the first thing you see is your Cover Stories with highlights from everything you follow, including magazines, sources, topics and social networks,” he says. “We look at a whole bunch or heuristics to determine what to show in your Cover Stories such as comments, likes and interactions on Flipboard as well as the social networks you have connected. As you add more things on Flipboard such as sources, magazines and people, their posts will begin to appear in your Cover Stories. We also give personalized recommendations for magazines and people to follow based on your interests. An algorithm-driven discovery engine analyzes millions of articles each day across more than 34,000 topics, suggesting content based on your interests and preferences. These are some of the ways we strive to make content that’s relevant to you more easily discoverable.”
Flipboard has a set of community guidelines on how to share and how not to share content on the service. Asked about some dos and don’ts beyond the standard guidelines, Quittner had the following to say.
“We see that readers appreciate focus. General topics such as ‘technology,’ ‘food’ or ‘design’ are great if you’re curating a collection for your own reference, but if you want to build an audience, general topics don’t give readers much to get excited about. Get specific, like instead of ‘gadgets’ go for ‘gadgets for kids’ or instead of ‘recipes’ choose ‘slow-cooker recipes.’”
“Once you’ve picked a topic, start thinking about your perspective on it. A magazine with a point of view and a tone of voice resonates well with readers. We see magazines about the same topic but with different points of view all the time. Your take on happiness, healthcare or fast cars will be different than anyone else’s.”
“When you first start a new magazine, keep it private for a while until you have about 40 items in it. By then you will know if you picked a topic you are really interested in and for your readers there will really be something to read. I’ve seen exceptions too – if you’re making a magazine about an event or for a class for instance you may not need the same amount of content. The 10 articles to read for science class this week can also work.”
“Then there are some practical things you want to think about such as a magazine title and cover photo. A compelling magazine title, which can be descriptive or creative, can attract new readers and so can an attractive cover. And don’t forget the basics: make sure your profile has a photo and description. Providing a face to a name helps establish trust and adds a human element to your profile.”
“I also want to make sure curators know they can use badges to spread the word about their magazines. At share.flipboard.com you can find tools to help build your magazines’ reach. There is a profile badge that will take people to your profile page with all your magazines, as well as a magazine widget. If you add the widget to your website, a magazine cover that updates dynamically will be displayed.”
On whether it’s better for users to create/curate one or two magazines or a bunch of them…
“Curating is personal so it really depends on what your goals are,” says Quittner. “If you want to connect with likeminded people and build up an audience, I recommend curating a separate magazine for each interest. If your magazine is more for yourself, than it’s fine to collect everything in one magazine.”
A couple of questions that a lot of people would probably ask are: Does it matter how much of the content in a user’s magazine comes from their own website? Is it always better to have a mix, or is it sometimes good to have magazines that explicitly feature your own content?
“It’s really up to you,” says Quittner. “A Flipboard magazine can be a great way to make your blog more discoverable or to make it look beautiful on a mobile device. We see bloggers who flip a lot of their own blog posts into a magazine and mix in stories by others about the same topic or with a similar point of view. We also see bloggers compliment the magazine with their own content on other platforms, for instance Medium posts, Tweets, Instagrams or photos from your phone.”
“Some of the larger blogs, curate multiple magazines on Flipboard,” he adds. “For instance, if your blog is about technology, you could curate all your stories about wearables into one magazine and create another magazine with all your games content.”
He notes that Flipboard has tools specifically for bloggers, which you can look through here.
As noted in a previous article, we’ve seen some people speculate on the SEO value of having content in Flipboard. Asked about this, Quittner says, “We’ve seen that Flipboard helps drive traffic to publishers and content creators by making content more discoverable. Now that Flipboard is on the Web, you may have noticed that your magazines will surface when you do a Google search. Adding descriptions to your magazine and your profile helps people understand what your content is about and it’s part of what the search engines crawl.”
In October, Flipboard said 10 million magazines had been created. Asked for an update on that and how many are actively updated, Quittner tells us, “Since we launched the third generation of Flipboard in October, which introduced topics we saw the number of magazines created by our readers grow fast. We’re now at 15 million. And over the same period of time we doubled the number of active curators. Flipboard 3.0 has also made people more engaged and while we had 30 million monthly active readers in October of last year, we now have almost 50 million.”
In addition to asking Quittner some questions, we reached out to Mathew Ingram, formerly of Gigaom (which was still operational at the time of our interaction), about getting more out of the service. Ingram has been featured on Flipboard’s own blog, where he talked about how he uses the service.
“I actually think having multiple magazines makes a lot of sense,” he tells WebProNews. “That way you can segment and target your various interests and appeal to different readers.”
On how much of the content in your magazine should come from your own stuff, Ingram says, “I think a 70-30 breakdown is a good rule of thumb for a lot of social media — so 70 percent or so content from other publishers or creators and about 30 percent from you.”
Asked about traffic, Ingram says, “We often see some high volume from Flipboard to our stories, although not regularly enough to count on. And it’s difficult to track why some stories take off and others don’t.”
Are you taking measures to increase your content’s exposure with Flipboard? Do you plan to in the future? Let us know in the comments.
“This week, we announced a change to Blogger’s porn policy. We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities,” says Jessica Pelegio, Social Product Support Manager at Google.
“So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.”
In 2013, Google cracked down on blogs that monetized from adult ads, but allowed bloggers to continue to post adult content as long as it was marked as such. But earlier this week, Google announced that it would ban “images and video that are sexually explicit or show graphic nudity” effective March 23. It would do this by making all that content private on old accounts, and disabling new accounts that posted adult content.
Apparently, after thinking this through (and likely receiving some unhappy feedback), Google has decided it best to let people express themselves on Blogger.
You do, however, still need to mark your blogs as “adult” if necessary.
