Bigmouthmedia recently reported that Google's Blogger.com had "yet to be turned into a true social networking site". Google have made steps today to address some of the issues with its beta Blogger and attempts to make some improvements to functionality. These improvements include:
- Labels to categorise or tag posts
- Privacy settings to control who can read your blog
- Drag and drop layout to make formatting easier
The new version of Blogger.com will also publish individual posts instead of republishing the entire blog after each post.
As Google brings new stability to its Blogger service, the YouTube social community welcomes its oldest videoblogger, 79 year old Peter.
Such is the power of social networking that Peter's first video clip on YouTube has attracted over 7,000 comments. His post is labelled 'grumbling', 'bitching', 'griping', and 'blogging', and has also attracted offline media across the globe in the form of GMTV and The Guardian in the UK and Channel 10 news in Australia.
Peter's success highlights the fact that blogs are proven tools of social networking that foster online interaction through sharing content. Not just the domain of the general public, blogs are also credible mediums for news dissemination and are used by politicians, news services and the business community as news sources.
The role of social networking in search is an increasingly important one. Blogs are a way of publishing new content quickly and can provide an archive of posts that can contain permanent inbound links or 'permalinks'. Blogs are link heavy, and inbound links to your site from high ranking sites is core to making your site visible.
New content on a web site proves to search engines that the site is being maintained, that it is up to date and there is still reason to match it against the latest web searches. Pages which appear online first have a head start in earning search engine trust and have the longest time to collect inbound links. Blogs allow you to be first with your own news by publishing it on the site before (or at the same time) as distributing it to news channels
Blog hosting services such as Google's Blogger.com and the more independent YouTube.com allow public and private organisations to generate interest in their content and prove its importance through tagging or inbound links.
