LiveJournal Testers Wanted

We have just added initial support for LiveJournal. We're looking for LiveJournal users to test our latest developer's release that can be downloaded here at our forums.

We are using LiveJournal's API so our Blog Writer supports LiveJournal-specific features, such as moods, LiveJournal tags, and private documents. Let us know what you think and report bugs via the Send Feedback feature under the Help menu in the Blog Writer.

Technorati : LiveJournal, Zoundry
Del.icio.us : LiveJournal, Zoundry
Ice Rocket : LiveJournal, Zoundry

Custom tags + My Delicious = Blogger Categories

Stewart Pollock (parkbench) recent post on using Zoundry illustrates an approach to creating a categories for his Blogger.com based blog using Delicious.

... Blogger does not make categories available but before this update to Zoundry Blog Writer I found a suggestion to use del.icio.us tags to create categories.
Any reader can see the current tags I have for this blog at http://del.icio.us/parkbench, and can then search within the tagged blog entries using the del.icio.us index of blog entries.

If you notice in his blog, he has categorized links at the bottom of his post labeled 'File under' pointing to his Delicious tagspace.

Currently Steve creates this manually by choosing the CustomTagSpace context menu option. Zoundry Blog Writer has a capability for one to add their own tagspaces, but we had not enabled (it became a todo item). Starting with build 126 (released Sept 6), we have enabled this capability, though we still do not have a UI. If you are comfortable in modifying a xml configuration file, then you can add custom tags to the menu system.

Instructions on how to add you own tags can be found here at our forums.

Technorati : Blog Writer, Blogger Categories, Custom Tags, Zoundry, folksonomy
Del.icio.us : Blog Software, Blog Writer, Zoundry, folksonomy

Google Blog Search

Google launched its new blog search engine today. I first read about it this morning at John Battelle's blog and the AP's story hit the wire this evening. Already there are a ton of posts on this hot topic (see it in action - search on "google blog search" at Google Blog Search.)

I want to make a couple of points:

1. Google's blog search engine indexes XML feeds instead of the blog's HTML, so make sure you have a feed at your blog. Anil Dash at Six Apart informs us that Six Apart offers an automatic feed of all public posts to LiveJournal and TypePad, so you're covered if your blog is at either of those services.

2. This really bodes well for our users who are writing product reviews and embedding affiliate links. Google's regular search engine included blog posts but now you have a better chance of getting more visibility at this specialized search engine.

I've played around a little with the new blog search engine and while I don't understand what goes into Google's relevance algorithm, I was happy to find some of our users' product reviews at or near the top of search results.

I also saw that our (very early stage) Zoundry Reviews Portal made it to the top of a few product searches. We haven't really done much with it yet, but our goal with the portal is to collect digests of product reviews from our users and create a product review search engine. Consumers will be able to conduct product research (especially out on the long tail) at our portal and then click through to read the full review at our user's blog and purchase through our user's affiliate link.

If Google's blog search engine does a great job indexing our users' blogs, then maybe we won't need to expand our portal. But then again, we have a few search optimization tricks up our sleeve that may give Google a run for their money. More on that later...

Technorati : Google, Zoundry, blog, search
Del.icio.us : Google, Zoundry, blog, search
Ice Rocket : Google, Zoundry, blog, search

Earn Money for Katrina Relief

We want to do our part in supporting Katrina relief efforts. Last week we switched our Red Cross donation program from tsunami relief to hurricane relief. If you enter zoundry-1003 in the Zoundry ID field in your Blog Writer, all commissions you earn from product links created with this ID will go to the American Red Cross Hurricane 2005 Relief fund. Zoundry will also donate its fee so 100% of your commissions will go to this fund.

Make sure to tell people on your blog that your product links are going to hurricane relief. As a reminder, you can also direct your commissions to other charities. For more information, go to our Charities page.

Technorati : Katrina, Red Cross
Del.icio.us : Katrina, Red Cross
Ice Rocket : Katrina, Red Cross

Sneak Preview of New Beta Release

Psst ... we have quietly posted our next beta version of the Zoundry Blog Writer (Build 123) on our web site. You can be one of the first to download and try it out before we make a public announcement later this month.

This new release includes all the features listed earlier in my developer release posts, plus the following new features requested by users in the last few weeks:

• Tag chooser - the Blog Writer now indexes all tags you have used and makes them available in a convenient checklist for your future posts.
• IceRocket ping - you can now ping this blog search engine when you publish a new post.
• Podcast-friendly - you can now drag and drop or insert mp3 files into your posts. The Blog Writer will automatically add the podcast enclosure to your mp3 links so your feeds will be ready for podcasting.

I want to thank everyone who helped test the developer releases. Your feedback is invaluable and we couldn't have done this without you.

Stay tuned - we will have more exciting news to share on the Zoundry service and new products shortly.

Technorati : Blog Editor, Blog Tool, IceRocket, Zoundry, podcast
Del.icio.us : Blog Editor, Blog Tool, IceRocket, Zoundry, podcast
Ice Rocket : Blog Editor, Blog Tool, Zoundry, podcast