I’ve been playing in MyBlogLog today (we will probably try the image widget out on Monday) and you can just about lose yourself in there if you aren’t careful… Here are some things you may have missed that could be worth your attention.

Speaking of MyBlogLog, judging solely from today’s indoctrination, if they leverage some kind of Technorati-type of search function, they could very well become one of the more popular and important blog tools out there (if they aren’t already). While Sifry’s blog hub does have a social aspect to it, it doesn’t quite leverage it the way MBL does…

Since Google’s Vanessa Fox is in the title, I am obligated to discuss her in this post. Over at the Google Webmaster blog, Vanessa posted a year in review wrap-up (better late than never), focusing on the highlights from the Google Webmaster Central team. Besides the Sitemap.org launch, the thing that stood out to me was the month of April. The team certainly expanded the features of their webmaster toolset, giving those that participate the ability to perform:

meta tag verification
notification of violations to the webmaster guidelines
reinclusion request form and spam reporting form
indexing information (can we crawl your home page? is your site indexed?)

These were not the only added features by any means. If you compared Google Webmaster Central at the beginning of 2006 to what it evolved into as the year went on, you probably wouldn’t recognize the service when you were done. For a full recap, check out Vanessa’s post.

Other items of note:

Lee Odden released another list… and as per usual, this one is as helpful as the others. This particular list discusses the social bookmark tool update (the purpose of the post) and the services that have been added. These include widgets for Google Reader; Netscape; StumbleUpon and DZone to name a few. Check out Lee’s post to see the entire list and to download any widgets you may be interested in.

Thanks to Jennifer Slegg’s detective-like work, we also learned you can now display Google AdSense ads on the same page as other non-AdSense contextual ads (except Yahoo), provided they don’t match the look and feel of Google’s. See Jennifer’s post for an in-depth look at how you can and cannot display AdSense ads next to others.

Finally, the man who looks like the leader of the social media optimization movement - Rand Fishkin - has a post that’s featured over at the Yahoo Publisher’s Network blog discussing how you can leverage social media (of all things). It contains, as you would expect, good information for those of you looking to take part in the social media movement. I’ve covered Rand’s take on this topic in the past and his information at the YPN blog is just as valuable now as it was before:

Intended to target widely-read online portals (Digg, Fark, Yahoo! Site of the Day, Boing Boing)

Fits criteria for being viral-worthy and link-worthy (creates a discussion, sparks controversy, provides something revolutionary or is exciting/interesting to viewers)

Easy to link to, email, blog about, excerpt and share

Timely, topical and useful

See what I mean? Enjoy your reading.

Tags: Google, Social Media, Widgets, AdSense

Posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 6:16 pm. Permalink