Zoundry as a Fundraising Tool

All of us at Zoundry believe in doing our part to support nonprofit organizations doing great work here and around the world. There are multiple ways to use our service as a fundraiser. First, you can enter a charity's Zoundry ID into your Blog Writer and the commissions you earn will go to that charity. You don't need to sign up with our service for this. Another way is to sign up for an account on behalf of a local nonprofit organization that you want to support. For example, say you wanted to start a fundraiser for a school trip planned for the fall. Enter the school's or sponsoring nonprofit organization's information into the Zoundry Service account settings. Then give the the Zoundry ID to everyone you know and ask them to download the Zoundry Blog Writer from our website. Once they enter that Zoundry ID into their Blog Writer, they can start writing about cool music and other recommended products and post to their own blogs or a group weblog that you can create at Blogger or TypePad. Everyone can buy products from each other's blogs and a percentage of every sale will go into the account. It's a great way to pool your purchasing power and earn money over the summer for your trip. These are just a couple of simple ideas - let me know if you come up with other ways to use Zoundry as a fundraising tool and I will share them here.

New Products and Where We're Heading

I am happy to announce that we now have two products - Zoundry Blog Writer and Blog Writer Lite. We are tying the regular Blog Writer closer to our service and have targeted it to people who want to share product recommendations in their weblog. The Lite version is a simple posting editor for our users who have only one weblog and are not interested in earning rewards from product recommendations. Among the new features in our Blog Writer are:

• Template-based preview - a very cool feature. Now you can preview your post in your blog's template.
• Multiple image drag-and-drop
• HTML cleanup at posting

We have also expanded our Zoundry Service with initial support for new merchants including Buy.com, iTunes Music Store, and TigerDirect. Now you can convert product page URLs from these merchants into Zoundry product links. Simply copy and paste (or drag and drop) the product URL from the merchant's site into the Blog Writer, right click and select Convert (Merchant) Link into a Product Link. Now our users have a wider selection of products and songs to recommend to friends and family. I also want to share a bit about where we are heading. Our near-term focus will be to expand our service by adding more merchants and integrating their product catalogs into our Zoundry Product Chooser search engine. Our goal is to offer a simple one-stop source for finding products and placing affiliate links in your weblog. Another priority is to help drive more traffic to our users' blogs. As I wrote earlier, adding Technorati tags will help our users get in front of all the users who use Technorati for searching. In addition, we have just started a Zoundry Reviews portal where our users can submit their reviews. We see it growing into a destination site for people to research products, especially niche items out on the Long Tail. When users find an interesting product at our portal, they can click through to the originating blog and purchase to reward the writer. I'll continue to write about our plans as we go forward. We have lots of great ideas, and we're getting excellent suggestions from our users. Stay tuned - you'll always get our latest news first here at the Zoundry Blog.

Why Tagging is Great

I had just started writing about the new tagging feature in our Blog Writer when I saw this timely article - 'Tags' Ease Sifting of Digital Data. It talks about how tags can help us find what we want within the vast amount of information on the Internet. Tags will also help people find your posts. Here's a simple example of how it works. Let's say you're writing a book review. You can use our Blog Writer to add a tag to Technorati, a blog search engine, called "books." Now when someone goes to Technorati and searches on "tag:books" your review shows up among all the other posts and photos with the same tag. "Books" is a pretty broad tag so you can use more specific tags. If your blog service supports categories, then your post is automatically tagged with the category so you can add another tag such as "mysteries." You can use just about anything as a tag and Technorati will create a specific page for you. This is a great way to use tags to create ad-hoc groups. Let's say that you and your friends want to share photos and posts from a group activity. You can all use the same tag, such as a codeword, in your individual blogs and Technorati will aggregrate all of your content when you search on that tag using the "tag:" prefix. If you register at Technorati, you can also create an RSS feed of this search and add it your RSS aggregator or MyYahoo!. We're still in the early stages of tagging so there are lots of new potential applications out there. One big problem that still needs to be solved is when people use different tags for the same thing, but as the article above mentions, engineers are working on clustering tools to tell when different tags are related. The combination of tags and syndication through RSS is powerful. You can get a much wider audience for your posts with just a little more work.