Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

This post was done using the new WordPress client for the iPhone, and my first impression is very positive.

The app is super simple to set up. It took me 30 seconds to put my blog’s URL, username and password, and that’s it.

Beyond a simple setup, the app has the popular feautres you would expect – write a post and attach photos (although it crashed when I tried attaching a few, but the recovery mode worked nicely).

The preview mode is also a great feature.

If you are a WordPress user with an iPhone, give it a try.

In case you use Twitter on an iPhone using the popular & excellent web based client by Thincloud, you will see ads, strategically placed, as the first post when viewing recent posts. I noticed them this morning. Here are two examples.

While I am lying in bed with bronchitis, my colleagues at Snap released our new feature – HotShots.

It is a page that shows the hot, mild and cold links, in a week of activity around the network of 2MM web sites that use Snap Shots. Search engine’s zeitgeist page shows what people are searching for when they start their activity online, while HotShots shows where people link to in their recent posts and articles and how their readers interact with that content.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch calls it “the linkgeist of the web”. I like that name.

Check it out (make sure you visit every Tuesday evening when an updated version goes live) and visit the Snap Blog to learn more about it.

Technorati Tags: Snap.com,HotShots,Linkgeist,Snap Shots,Zeitgeist

A few days ago I responded on the Snap blog to a post on Read/WriteWeb and explained why Snap Shots is the most popular semantic application in the world. One of the applications mentioned in the RWW post is SmartLinks by AdaptiveBlue. As I wrote in my post, it looks very-very-very similar to Snap Shots.

Less than 24 hours after my post hit the wires, I received an email from MyBlogLog notifying me that I was added to a community that I “have shown repeated interest in: adaptiveblue”. Well, it’s always a good practice to follow the competition, but to be added without my permission to a community I have no interest to be part of, and to be notified after the fact – that’s brutal and rude!

Think about it this way. Amazon has one of the best recommendation engines on the web. Can you image that a recommended product automatically gets added to your shopping cart just because you visit the product page once or twice…

MyBlogLog should change this features in two ways:

• Implement some web manners and change this feature to be permission based (opt-in)
• Tune the Recommendation engine so it won’t jump to conclusions and suggest me a community just because I visited the site once or twice. A repeated interest means at least three times. But again, this should just be a suggestion.

Several readers and friends have asked me for tips and suggestions on how they can improve their blog or how to start  a blog. I thought it would make sense to list what powers this blog.

• Hosting service – I host this domain on BlueHost.com were I get much more that what I used to get from my previous crappy provider. I get more space (disk space, # of domains, email accounts etc), better tools, good CS support and a good price.

• Blogging platform - I use WordPress.org (self hosted). In my opinion this open source blogging platform is the best. It keeps evolving, improving and it provides a large variety of themes and plug-ins which extends ever further the platform’s capabilities. I have tried using other platforms such as Typepad, Vox, Blogger and the hosted WordPress.com and none come close to the capabilities of a self hosted WordPress.org blog.

• WordPress Plug-ins - One of the great things about WordPress is the variety of themes and plug-ins. The control panel inside WordPress makes it very easy to activate/deactivate plug-ins or switch themes. Here are the ones that are currently installed:
  • SnapShots – The product I am very proud to be one of its creators, provides a better user experience and an entirely new source of ad inventory for every web site owners.
  • Akisment – eliminate blog comments spam
  • WordPress Blog stats
  • All In One SEO pack
  • iWPhone – A plug-in that automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone.
  • AddThis – social bookmarking & sharing made easy
  • WordPress Database backup
  • Current theme installed is ISM – this might change in the future

• Other Sidebar widgets
  • Lijit – Search tools for a blog
  • MyBlogLog
  • Feedburner for content syndication (don’t forget to offer a “Subscribe By Email” option)
  • Site Analytics done by Google Analytics, SiteMeter with help from Lijit and MyBlogLog (all services show different stats for some reason…)

• Desktop blogging application – Windows Live Writer makes blogging very easy. I wrote in the past a detailed post, followed by another one, about it.

I hope it helps those who are currently blogging or about to start blogging.

A month ago I suggested to MyBlogLog to improve the way they display user’s online identities under the profile page. Today I noticed that they have listen and added favicons, with the matching social service name as Alt text, next to the usernames. This is a small change that makes a big difference.

Kudos for listening and fixing.

AOL has acquired Yedda to make it the Q&A service of the AOL network.

Congratulations to Yaniv, Avichai and their team for creating a great product and becoming AOL’s forth acquisition in Israel, following Mirabilis ICQ), Relegence and Quigo.

Read more here: TechCrunch (English) and the.coils (Hebrew)

Today at BlogWorld, I met the product manager and the lead developer for Live Writer. Besides complementing them for creating a great desktop blogging application, I also learned that the official version for the product has just been released – welcome Windows Live Writer 2008.

I wrote in the past about this tool and how great it is. The new release makes things even better. Here are four examples for improved capabilities:

• Embedding images and video became easier and with more capabilities. For example – when pasting an embedded code from any video sharing service while working in the Web Layout mode, Live Writer immediately displays the video player instead of the html code. In the previous version you could only paste code in HTML mode
• The “New page” feature lets you create new pages. The previous version enabled only the creation of new posts
• An “Add category” feature was added (prior to that I had to do it via the WordPress admin console)
• If you add post’s “Keywords”, those would automatically map to WordPress’s tags (a ver 2.3 feature)

Basically, I have less and less need to login to WordPress admin in order to post on a regular basis. The only reason to login is to manage comments or update the site template & plug-ins.

Kudos to the Microsoft Live team for the improvements. I highly recommend installing/upgrading.

BlogWorld kicked off last night and the exhibit started this morning. The atmosphere here is quite different than ad:tech, New York–much more calm and relaxed.

At BlogWorld Snap is presenting Snap Shares – our program that helps publishers earn more money using Snap Shots by sharing with some of the ad impressions that are now part of the Shots. It creates an incremental revenue stream while delivering highly relevant content at the top area of the Shot. It works great with Google AdSense and with other affiliate programs.

We have been getting many visitors to our booth, handed out cool swags, and provided answers and information as well as received great feedback from the users.

Tonight and tomorrow the rest of the company will join us at Vegas to conquer the halls with the cool Snap T-Shirts.

Google OpenSocial vs. Facebook F8 – Doesn’t it look, feel and smell like Isreali, or actually any country’s, politics?

Coalitions are being formed. PR spins are created trying to set the public opinion. The one you voted for yesterday will most likely disappoint you tomorrow. And no one asks the people (users) what really bothers them.

I wonder whether political/strategic advisors were also hired to run those campaigns.

photo credit: mattyfacex