Luckily a couple of Friendfeed users have been hard at work dealing with that very issue and if you have a blog hosted on either Blogger or WordPress, then you are in luck.    The Blogger method is much easier as it is just a simple copy and paste.   The WordPress method has a bit more to it.    But nevertheless, both methods have so far been receiving glowing reviews and I will shortly be installing the WordPress version on my own blog to capture some of that Friendfeed magic for myself.

You can find the Blogger method here and it was designed by Pat Hawks.   He has scripts for both the old and the new Blogger templates and as I said, it’s a simple copy and paste.   Since I haven’t used Blogger since last year, I can’t personally endorse the script and say how good it is.   But he was linked to and praised by Louis Gray so that has to count for something.

Here’s what it apparently looks like.   Plain but functional but far as I’m concerned, functional is all that matters.

Now for the WordPress plugin.   It’s made by Glenn Slaven and it’s like any other WordPress plug-in.   You have to download it, unzip it and upload it to your blog domain.   After activating it, you have to enter your Friendfeed details and configure it.   You then have to go into your WordPress template, to the single page template, and place the <?php wp_ffcomments(); ?> inside the loop so that Friendfeed can match the page with the comments on Friendfeed.

Now here is what it’s supposed to look like :

What I like about it is that you can see the picture of the Friendfeed user, you can also see who “liked” the post and how many people commented on it.   So a lot of information there.

I haven’t been able to find any live blogs with the plug-in though. Glenn says that Corvida was his first live tester but that blog is currently down.   If anybody knows of a blog that is running these plug-ins, please post the link in the comments as I would really like to see the plug-ins in action.

Now what we need next is a way to export Twitter comments whenever you post a link to one of your blog posts on Twitter.    I wonder when someone will come up with that?

Written by Mark O’Neill

And that’s why the website guest book is pretty much obselete now – because it’s a haven for spammers. Now that the emphasis is moving more towards blogs rather than static websites, sites such as Yahoo-owned MyBlogLog are shooting up in popularity. It’s basically the Web 2.0 of website guestbooks or to put it another way, it’s the social network for bloggers.

The beauty about MyBlogLog is that it is a closed community in the sense that you have to register to be a member and then to join a particular community, you have to apply to each webmaster to join. They then have to approve you. So no-one can spam a MBL community the way spammers used to spam my website guestbook back when Jeffrey was signing it. The moment someone starts spamming me, I can just kick them out and block them. Everytime someone applies to join my blog community, I get an email asking me to verify them or deny them entry. So I like the control that MBL gives me over the people in the blog community, something that an ordinary text guest book never gave me when spammers were running riot.

I’ve heard the usual comments and complaints – that MyBlogLog isn’t a social network, that it’s just a gimmick. Well I beg to differ. As I said previously, it’s a social network for bloggers. MBL allows you to put a face to each of your visitors. You can see who has been to read your pages, your visitors can see your face and it adds a whole new dimension to the blogging experience.

But the icing on the cake has to be a WordPress plugin made by an Italian developer. The plugin is called MyAvatars and it puts MBL avatars inside people’s blog comments. I think this is really great. Not only does it personalise and brighten up the comments page but right away you are connecting with your readers on a personal level. A couple of people have complained that the plug-in has slowed down the blog but I haven’t noticed any such delays.

MyBlogLog also gives you the equivalent of an email mailing list by giving you the ability to send out a message to your community members which will be sent to their email boxes (an ability which obviously should be used responsibly).

But MBL have also introduced a few new widgets which are worth a mention :

With Me Sidebar Widget : if you fill in the usernames of the online services you use, you can have a widget that tracks your activity around the web and aggregates it to a widget that you can put on your site. A bit like Friendfeed.

With Me Full Page : same as the sidebar widget but this one fills a whole page. It really gives Friendfeed a run for its money.

About Me : I use this one on my own blog. This widget provides links to your various online websites that you participate in, provided you have filled in those details beforehand.

Email Signature : allows you to make an interactive HTML email signature for Outlook, Thunderbird and Yahoo Mail.

Signing up for MyBlogLog is absolutely free. If you have a blog or if you regularly visit blogs, it is definately worth signing up for a MBL account. It could completely change the way you look at blogs from now on.

Written by Mark O’Neill

Technorati means business with WordPress Blogs, and rightfully so. With all the potential vulnerabilities of older, unpatched versions of WordPress out there, many blogs have become fair game to spammers worldwide.

If you have not upgraded WordPress since 2.3.2, and have a claimed blog on Technorati, you probably received an email from Technorati architect Ian Kallen, who writes:

“…Blogs that have been compromised by this security vulnerability are typified by having links to spam destinations inserted onto the blog page. These link insertions may be invisible to casual observations; the links are often obscured by style attributes that render them invisible. These links are still seen by crawlers such as Technorati’s, Google’s and Yahoo’s. You can find these links by viewing the source of the blog pages or, when using Firefox, looking under “Tools” -> “Page Info” -> “Links”. Blogs hosted on wordpress.com are not affected by this issue; only blogs hosted on their own installations of WordPress from wordpress.org require concern…”

The NowSourcing blog was a couple versions back and noticed a couple spam links creeping up here, so we bit the bullet and upgraded to WordPress 2.5. For those of you that have not done so yet, be sure to at least be on 2.3.3.

The WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin was surprisingly bump-free (be sure to check all the backup files, we noticed that the wp-content folder didn’t backup automatically).

Technorati has often been criticized of not being on top of things, but this time around I must say good job, Ian and crew! Granted that many will be running around like chickens with their heads cut off

Before you say “hey, you write about social media. Where’s the social media?” I was just getting to that Technorati authority and blog search coupled with WordPress blogging is at the heart of social media. If you woke up tomorrow and your or your client’s blog was dropped by Technorati, there could be some serious ramifications. Conversation is quickly becoming the new form of metrics in social media (sorry pageviews), and without a guide like Technorati, we’d be up a creek without a paddle.

But what if Technorati removed thousands of authority blogs en masse? Best upgrade soon, all!