How Blogs Are Going Social

As blogging evolves, one natural trend that is emerging strongly is making your blog more social. It becomes less of something to simply read, and more of a community destination in which to interact.

How does one make a blog a happening place? How does one involve readers in expressing themselves? How to provide interaction beyond “leave a comment”?

Obviously, you need to provide a space on your blog for your readers to do things together. You want to enable your users to poll, debate, ask questions, leave useful links and perform group search. The idea is to bring community features to life on your blog and stimulate social interaction.

One solution is to add widgets. For example you can add a poll through Poll Daddy. Or add a microblog through Twitter. Or simply throw in a Google gadget – but you want to be sure the gadget goes beyond just providing information. You want social interaction, not just content syndication.

You can use all these disparate platforms or simply use TeemingPod. TeemingPod is a platform that helps you embed powerful social interactions right inside a web page.
TeemingPod not only helps in adding web2.0 sizzle to a blog but also helps the blogger to interact with the readers in various forms like debate, share links, questions and answers, poll etc. It also helps blog readers to collaborate with each other, apart from the blogger, who share the same interest.
To know how to TeemingPod helps sizzle up your blog, check out this post.

For More Info… Please Don’t Leave This Page!

How many times do you go to a web page looking for some information, and find only a part of what you are looking for? Then you have to leave the site and rely on search tools or discussion groups to hopefully serve up some additional relevant material on the topic. Information revolution has made available every possible information just a click away. However, it has had an unfortunate side effect. While it benefits from expanding information availability, the amount of time it takes to find the right answer impedes productivity and drives up costs.

There are various tools which help reducing the time to search for the right kind of information. Like Google blog search, yahoo forum search, Google website search etc. But, still they have their own limitations.

A solution which would give all the related information with the topic we are searching for is desired in this age of information revolution. This knowledge base would be created by users which share same interest and read similar articles. Hence, the information would be relevant.

On the other hand, content owner of a webpage would also benefit by gaining insights of users' thinking, their questions and even their knowledge of the topic.

TeemingPod offers one such solution to maximize business value from information. It provides a flexible platform designed to enhance information sharing and communication in-context (/embedded) with the topic being discussed on that web page. When a user does not find information on web page, one can look for the information in TeemingPod embedded in that page. User can ask questions, reply to queries, leave behind useful links related to the web page, discuss the topic with other readers sharing same interests etc.

Every reader can contribute information relevant to the web page in the pod, thus enriching the web page content with additional information. Readers can streamline sharing of trusted knowledge that can significantly improve content of the web page.

Increasing stickiness and engagement of website

When taking a stock of things that happened in 2008, I was thinking of few terms in Web world which have ruled the market. Some of the terms which came to my mind were mash-ups, web services, micro-blogging, social networking etc. A major challenge faced by every website in 2008 was to increase stickiness and engagement of the web site so that the user spends maximum time on web site.

There is a subtle difference between stickiness and engagement which makes a huge difference on how you design your web page. A fine balance must be struck between stickiness and engagement.

Stickiness concerns itself with keeping the user on the page whereas engagement has to do with keeping user involved in doing something. Most engagement tools (hyperlinks, buttons, blog links etc) actually drive the user away from the webpage, thus reducing stickiness. On the other hand stickiness enhancing tools (widgets, mash-ups, RSS feeds etc) end up in a one-way communication, eliminating engagement.

Below is a graph which shows Engagement vs. Stickiness.

Websites which are designed for Content Syndication is an example of high stickiness, but low engagement.

iGoogle / Gaming websites are a good example of website which has high engagement but low stickiness.

When we write an article and just provide few related references of other articles/websites, has neither engagement nor stickiness.

The right way to make a web page interactive is to provide both engagement and stickiness. Hence, to provide high engagement and stickiness to your web page, it should be embedded with social interaction. TeemingPod is a great way to embed social interactions in any web page. To know the process of embedding TeemingPod in your web page, click here.