Be Found: Adding RSS Feeds to Your Blog

If you have a specialized website or a blog where you publish new content regularly, don't forget to add a feed to it. News feeds come in different standards, with RSS being the most popular one.

Adding a feed to your blog is very easy, especially if you are hosting your blog on large platforms like Blogger or Word Press. In this case, you simply need to check the right box in your management settings.

If, however, you are hosting your blog independently, adding a feed will require a bit of code copying and pasting.

Tools for creating syndication feeds:

http://www.devx.com/xml/Article/10790
http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/rss_feeds.htm
http://www.webhero.org/Homepages/newsfeeds.htm
http://www.rss-specifications.com/display-rss.htm

RSS directories (submit your RSS feed):

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm

Tools for creating blogs:

Blogger (by Google)

Fantastic service, loaded with features, ability to streamline AdSense ads and many other perks. Anbsolutely free.

Wordpress

Create a nice-looking blog with fancy features in less than 2 minutes, absolutely no technical skills required, everything is free, including hosting. Charges apply for advanced features and additional users.

BlogRolling

Add links to your blog as you surf, on the fly, without opening up your HTML template.

Drupal

An advanced portal with collaborative book, search engines friendly URLs, online help, roles, full content search, site watching, threaded comments, version control, blogging, news aggregator.

BlogPatrol

Track your blog stats free of charge.

SEO Perspective: Why Have a Blog?

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Blogs: Time to Get Serious

As reported by TechCrunch, blogs are officially media. In two determinations handed down on September 4, 2007, the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) found that political blogs and bloggers are media for the purposes of US Electoral Law.

The blogosphere is shaking its head and giggling, since blogs have been one of the most reliable sources of information for a few years already. Everyone knows that if you want to find good information, use blogs and social networking sites. People rely on other people's opinions and referrals much more eagerly than search engines. It is now commonly known that search engines favor large sites with thousands of pages whereas sites of this size often belong to official "mainstream" organizations and commercial entities - and who can afford to trust these organizations nowadays when oil costs $80 per barrel and most of it has to be imported? I know I can't. Needless to say, there is no such thing as independent media, and I am not interested in infomercials.

If I want to know what's really going on in the US and the world for that matter, I read French, British and Russian news sources. I then browse blogs and specialized forums and contrast and compare information from these news sources with what people are saying.

So thank God for blogs and their innocence, however transitory it may be. It will not be too long before this medium is completely compromised with SEO-optimized content that has been sponsored from A to Z. There is a lot of it happening already, but for the moment, one can still find plenty of interesting, truly independent, blogs offering fantastic content.

Logically then, I feel saddened by the now official status of blogs as media. To me it indicates that from now own mainstream commercial entities will begin taking blogs seriously, hence "spinning" the blogosphere and eventually destroying blogging the way we know it now.