Intense Debate: Take Your Blog To The Next Level
The first step to get involved in social media is by starting your very own blog. Everybody has something to share with the world (not talking about your lunch adventures though). After all, you don’t want to participate on Twitter and Facebook without having a plan .When you have a blog, you can use your social profiles to drive traffic to your blog and solidify your community.
Every blogger would tell you that getting people to comment on posts can be challenging. Top bloggers have mastered this art. Those bloggers who do not get a lot of traffic on their website, will have a tough time getting people to participate. The best way to do it is by making it easy for visitors to comment on each post, add their own content, and rate what others have to say. That’s where Intense Debate comes in. It’s a powerful comment management system by the people behind WordPress that turns your comment system into a powerful community tool for your readers.
Intense Debate is very easy to install and adds a whole other dimension to your blog. It lets your visitors to comment on your blog by using their Twitter, Facebook, or Intense Debate account. Of course, they can do it the good old way (with a name and URL). Since Intense Debate is compatible with Akismet, you can deal with spam comments more effectively as well.
5 Top Social Media Optimized Themes for WordPress
Intend to start a social media friendly website with WordPress? These days with all the plugins you can download for WordPress, that is not a tough task to accomplish. In general, you want your WordPress theme to integrate Twitter, Facebook, and other top social networks. Being able to handle videos and photos without a hassle would be favorable too. There are hundreds of themes that match that criteria. But these 5 social WordPress themes are a good place to start:
Local Theme: Local networks are the talk of town in social media circles these days. With this theme, you can create a local portal and get your local community involved in it too.
Accumulo: an attractive RSS feed aggregator that makes it easy to create a portal based on the content generated on top social networks (similar to AllTop).
AntiSocial: an attractive WordPress theme that enables you to start your own personal portal, while giving your visitors the chance to connect with you on top social networking sites.
AppsFire: iPhone Apps Meet Social Media
Apple iPhone may be based on a closed system, but it has a huge fan base. Lots of people have bought into iPhone’s promise and have gotten on board with the platform. Not everyone uses the same types of apps on their devices. That’s why sharing your lists with others and looking at their list can be a useful way to provide value. Thanks to AppsFire, we all can share our favorite apps with the world and help others discover new apps.
The service is quite easy to get to work. All you have to do is download AppsFire’s iPhone application and import your apps. You can then share them with the world. It’s also possible to go over what others have had to share on their pages as well. Best of all, you can send a link to your very own apps page from Facebook or Twitter. (more…)
The Early Edition: Ultimate Feed Reader for iPad
It is quite funny how many people claim to be social media experts these days. You can’t call yourself an expert when your industry is changing by the day. One might know a lot about Twitter or Facebook, but that’s different than being an “experts.” If you want to among the top players in your industry, you need to stay 0n the top of what goes on in your industry at all times. There are plenty of blogs and forums that one can keep track of to learn new things, come up with new ideas, and even find partners to work with in the future.
Google Reader is a nice feed reader, but sometimes you need a feed reader that does more than just organizing your feeds. The Early Edition is an innovative feed reader for iPad that not only fetches the latest posts from your favorite RSS feeds, it also turns them into a virtual newspaper. So instead of you having to go through a list of feeds, you can see a snapshot of what’s going on in your world.
The Early Edition is pretty easy to work with. All you have to do is add your favorite feeds to it, and it does the rest for you. It may not have fancy features that you see in top feed readers such as Google Reader. But it does make it much easier to read your feeds like a newspaper. Depending on the number of feeds that you add to this app, you are going to get more pages in your newspaper. The slider at the bottom enables you to skip pages and go through your feeds more conveniently. (more…)
