Back tracked this site from my stats. It will take more research to find out how useful it is, but, it’s a good way of seeing where you stand on your subjects.

– How popular is ? (://URLFAN)
://URLFAN is an evolving experiment designed to discover what websites the blogosphere is discussing all in real time. It does this by cultivating the content of thousands of RSS feeds and parsing billions of pieces of information.

Now every website owner can see who’s talking about their site in real time and how they compare to every other site on the Internet. There are many sites designed to rank the “traffic” of a website, such as Alexa, however ://URLFAN is different. We rank sites according to their popularity in the fast moving and growing world of RSS feeds.

My subject was Crispin Porter + Bogusky, or CPB Group, on The Next Wave site. We were pretty high on the ranking.

We often learn more from our students than from our studies, and in the last seminar someone asked what the difference between blogs and forums.

I don’t feel that I offered the best answer, since blog posts offer a forum for discussion.

While this is simplistic: a forum is a place where a community can post and discuss things- many to many- mostly posed as short questions. A well moderated forum keeps new users from reposting the same questions and makes sure questions are framed in useful language. “Help, my blog is broken” isn’t a good forum question- “My categories in wordpress aren’t working” is a better question.

A blog is a place where a single user posts ideas- and builds a community- that may eventually add a forum to the site. WordPress allows for multiple authors, with different degrees of access, so this model can be adapted to a forum concept, but generally, blog posts are longer questions, and the tools of moderation are structured differently. The developers of WordPress have built a forum software that integrates closely with WordPress- bbPress, and over time, the functions may begin to overlap. Some blogs leave the base level of ownership as “author” allowing anyone to publish- this turns a blog into a forum.

The reality is, the difference is in the eye of the beholder. The true measurement really comes in the size and activity of the audience. A blog that is read by nobody, with few comments or trackbacks isn’t much of a forum just as a forum with no participants is really just a blog.

The thread that got this idea going is linked to below- where a bunch of academics discuss it at length- in a “forum”- I found the following bit interesting.

SCoPE: Seminars: Distinction between forums and blogs
From Formal courses: Blog protocol, Public/Private, Forums/Blogs (Long Post) by derekc on Fri Feb 16 22:24:00 2007:
1. the blog owner posts without an awareness of audience
2. the blog owner posts with an attempt to identify audience (at this stage, the poster finishes their entries with questions or invites “invisible” readers to comment)
3. the blog owner posts for a clear audience (e.g. the poster refers back to blog commentators or includes links to other blogs or sites by them)
4. a regular group of commentators is set, and dialogues take place via blog comments
5. some of these commentators start making entries (as “guest bloggers”), and each of them goes through stages #1 to #4.
6. a regular group of posters is thread, with a group voice gradually developed.

Either way, the idea of community and community generated content is key to the whole “web 2.0” experience. If your site is built for business- and you aren’t involving your customers- you won’t be in business for long. Either customers will discuss your products and services on your site- or they will do it on someone elses (including their own). Consider yourself informed and go out and let the community discussion begin.

Lorelle has an amazing post about plugins for handling pictures, well worth the time to investigate. I’ve found that many themes don’t handle pictures well, and trying to attach a caption isn’t really something that a stock WordPress install can do. Until we have time to check out some plugins with WordPress 2.1, we’ll just send you to Lorelle’s page:

WordPress Plugins for Images, Photographs, and Graphics « Lorelle on WordPress
WordPress offers fairly simple image uploading and the automatic creation of thumbnails, but there are a lot more you can do with your images with WordPress Plugins.

There are a lot of WordPress Plugins to help you upload, sort, arrange, enhance, edit, frame, popup, popin, lightbox, photo album, work with online image storage support and services, and manage your images.

Unfortunately, not all media-based WordPress Plugins, no matter how impressive and fun, are well supported or well documented. Creating an image-oriented WordPress Plugin is challenge, hard work, and takes a lot of maintenance as technology changes and WordPress upgrades. Many create these for fun and then let them go. I’ve done my best to only highlight the WordPress Plugins which feature strong documentation, easy instructions, and show recent activity and support.

One thing I can’t stress enough- remember to give your pictures great alt tags (title and description). Google will give a properly labeled photo great page rank if you have the search term in the alt text. A post I did with a photo of the band Supernova ended up number 4 in google for a bit- this was when the TV show was on and millions were watching.

If you don’t understand what to put in alt text, here is my rule- what would describe the picture to a blind person? Write a good description for a blind person- and you’ve got Google’s attention.