I’ve begun to dig through the net as part of my Internet Tools Wiki project for the most useful articles on specific Internet Tools. Every once in a while, I will post collection updates on the blog.

And you guessed it, today’s tool is LinkedIn, the business social network service.

The collection includes recent and older articles that are directly relevant to helping you better utilize LinkedIn as a networking and business tool. You can find the latest article collection and community advice for LinkedIn on the Internet Tools Wiki.

• Can LinkedIn Increase your Sales? (Jill Konrath) - A free 14 page ebook detailing, yes, how to use LinkedIn to increase your sales. If you’re in sales or promoting a product as a startup, this is absolutely worth a read.
• Getting Started Building Your LinkedIn Network - A step-by-step guide if you’re completely new to LinkedIn on getting yourself set up for networking through the service.
• LinkedIn Best Practices (Mark Davis) - Six quick tweaks to improve your visibility on and browsing of LinkedIn.
• 5 Step Guide to Using LinkedIn and Facebook (Anshu Sharma) - Focused on when to accept contacts and when LinkedIn is needed for business. I’m advocate a more liberal approach to accepting business contacts on LinkedIn, but useful regardless.
• LinkedIn as Headhunting Tool (Bernard Lunn) - A favorite article of mine.
• How to use LinkedIn for Job Searching (Laura Schneider) - Title explains it all
• LinkedIn Tips and Tweaks: Do More with your LinkedIn Account (Amit Agarwal) - 7 Simple Tips
• Gigantic Tips Guide for Finding Jobs With LinkedIn - There’s at least 50 tips in this article.
• Etiquette for LinkedIn (Penelope Trunk) - 7 Etiquette tips
• Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn (Guy Kawasaki) - An older article by respected Entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki.

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I’ve begun to dig through the net as part of my Internet Tools Wiki project for the most useful articles on specific Internet Tools. Every once in a while, I will post collection updates on the blog.

And you guessed it, today’s tool is LinkedIn, the business social network service.

The collection includes recent and older articles that are directly relevant to helping you better utilize LinkedIn as a networking and business tool. You can find the latest article collection and community advice for LinkedIn on the Internet Tools Wiki.

• Can LinkedIn Increase your Sales? (Jill Konrath) - A free 14 page ebook detailing, yes, how to use LinkedIn to increase your sales. If you’re in sales or promoting a product as a startup, this is absolutely worth a read.
• Getting Started Building Your LinkedIn Network - A step-by-step guide if you’re completely new to LinkedIn on getting yourself set up for networking through the service.
• LinkedIn Best Practices (Mark Davis) - Six quick tweaks to improve your visibility on and browsing of LinkedIn.
• 5 Step Guide to Using LinkedIn and Facebook (Anshu Sharma) - Focused on when to accept contacts and when LinkedIn is needed for business. I’m advocate a more liberal approach to accepting business contacts on LinkedIn, but useful regardless.
• LinkedIn as Headhunting Tool (Bernard Lunn) - A favorite article of mine.
• How to use LinkedIn for Job Searching (Laura Schneider) - Title explains it all
• LinkedIn Tips and Tweaks: Do More with your LinkedIn Account (Amit Agarwal) - 7 Simple Tips
• Gigantic Tips Guide for Finding Jobs With LinkedIn - There’s at least 50 tips in this article.
• Etiquette for LinkedIn (Penelope Trunk) - 7 Etiquette tips
• Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn (Guy Kawasaki) - An older article by respected Entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki.

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What service are you anxiously awaiting FriendFeed to add? Well, let’s see if we can’t find out. Vote on any of the options in this poll or add your own option. Hopefully this poll will give us a better gauge of what users want.

For those of you who don’t know about FriendFeed, see the Internet Tools Wiki description.

Yes, I did not include a fill-in option in order to combat spam and false answers. These options were taken from a previous FriendFeed conversation.

This poll will close on Sunday, June 22nd at 11:59 PM.

If you want to put this poll on your website, this link contains the raw javascript code. Help get as many votes as possible for this poll - That way everyone has a better idea of what users want.

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What service are you anxiously awaiting FriendFeed to add? Well, let’s see if we can’t find out. Vote on any of the options in this poll or add your own option. Hopefully this poll will give us a better gauge of what users want.

For those of you who don’t know about FriendFeed, see the Internet Tools Wiki description.

Yes, I did not include a fill-in option in order to combat spam and false answers. These options were taken from a previous FriendFeed conversation.

This poll will close on Sunday, June 22nd at 11:59 PM.

If you want to put this poll on your website, this link contains the raw javascript code. Help get as many votes as possible for this poll - That way everyone has a better idea of what users want.

Share This Post!

I love synergies in my products. I like it that I can take dates sent to my Gmail and copy them into my Google Calendar. This time, I want to tell you about a few of my favorite synergies with Remember the Milk, perhaps my favorite of all Internet Tools.

If you’re unfamiliar with Remember the Milk, check out the Internet Tools Wiki article on it. Or just know that it’s an online to-do and task management system.

Here’s a few of the many ways to improve your use of Remember the Milk via synergies:

• Gmail: Via a Firefox extension, you can install Remember the Milk into your Gmail. You visit your Gmail all the time, so it makes sense to put your calendar and to-do list system on the same platform. You can copy links from your Gmail into RtM, update tasks, or connect with your mail contacts.
• Jott: By far my favorite synergy with Remember the Milk. Call Jott, tell them you want to Jott to Remember the Milk, and then add a task by voice to your to-do list. You can even specify the time and date, and thus get a reminder without ever looking on a computer. A lifesaver, especially when you’re on the road.
• Twitter: If you are a big Twitter user, then this is for you. Send Twitter a direct message with your task and the time/date and it’ll appear in your RtM task list.
• Google Maps: It’s long been integrated with Remember the Milk. Add a location to your Remember the Milk and then you can use RtM to map out where you have to go during the day.
• Google Gears: Going to be in a place without Internet? Want to use Remember the Milk offline? Then just install Google Gears and you’ll be set!
• Google Calendar: Google Calendar and Remember the Milk have a lot of similarities, so it makes sense that they can work together. Send your RtM tasks into your Google Calendar so you can see everything in one interface.
• iPhone/iPod Touch: Warning: this service costs a little money, but is well worth it if you’re an iPhone user. You gain a very clean interface for adding and managing tasks while on-the-go
• Blackberry: Again, it costs money, but MilkSync is the Blackberry version of Remember the Milk and is worth every cent. Plus the people at RtM are awesome, and why wouldn’t you want to support them?

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I love synergies in my products. I like it that I can take dates sent to my Gmail and copy them into my Google Calendar. This time, I want to tell you about a few of my favorite synergies with Remember the Milk, perhaps my favorite of all Internet Tools.

If you’re unfamiliar with Remember the Milk, check out the Internet Tools Wiki article on it. Or just know that it’s an online to-do and task management system.

Here’s a few of the many ways to improve your use of Remember the Milk via synergies:

• Gmail: Via a Firefox extension, you can install Remember the Milk into your Gmail. You visit your Gmail all the time, so it makes sense to put your calendar and to-do list system on the same platform. You can copy links from your Gmail into RtM, update tasks, or connect with your mail contacts.
• Jott: By far my favorite synergy with Remember the Milk. Call Jott, tell them you want to Jott to Remember the Milk, and then add a task by voice to your to-do list. You can even specify the time and date, and thus get a reminder without ever looking on a computer. A lifesaver, especially when you’re on the road.
• Twitter: If you are a big Twitter user, then this is for you. Send Twitter a direct message with your task and the time/date and it’ll appear in your RtM task list.
• Google Maps: It’s long been integrated with Remember the Milk. Add a location to your Remember the Milk and then you can use RtM to map out where you have to go during the day.
• Google Gears: Going to be in a place without Internet? Want to use Remember the Milk offline? Then just install Google Gears and you’ll be set!
• Google Calendar: Google Calendar and Remember the Milk have a lot of similarities, so it makes sense that they can work together. Send your RtM tasks into your Google Calendar so you can see everything in one interface.
• iPhone/iPod Touch: Warning: this service costs a little money, but is well worth it if you’re an iPhone user. You gain a very clean interface for adding and managing tasks while on-the-go
• Blackberry: Again, it costs money, but MilkSync is the Blackberry version of Remember the Milk and is worth every cent. Plus the people at RtM are awesome, and why wouldn’t you want to support them?

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For the last few days, I’ve been working on some design and functionality features of BenParr.com. I’m nowhere near done, but I’m ready to release a new section of BenParr.com: The Internet Tools Wiki

The Internet Tools Wiki is a project designed to aggregate the most useful information on the internet regarding internet tools and social media. What does that mean? It means that, unlike Crunchbase or Wikipedia, which are focused on general, non-biased information about companies and products, the Internet Tools Wiki is chiefly concerned with effective utilization of these products and aggregates the most impressive articles and community knowledge to that end. In the next few weeks and months, you can expect blog articles to coincide with wiki articles, for articles across the net to be added to the Internet Tools Wiki Database, and for more and more tools to be added over time.

The information you will find on most of the wiki pages:

• A Brief Description of the internet tool, no more than two sentences
• A Value Proposition explaining why you should use the tool, no more than two sentences
• BenParr.com Articles, an aggregate of all relevant articles on improving your use of an Internet tool from the BenParr.com blog
• Other Featured Articles, a collection of articles from myself and the community on how to best utilize each Internet tool.
• Community Advice, the section where users can place their tips, tricks, and information on how to best utilize Internet tools.

The wiki is currently bare bones and does not have proper information for most internet tools - That will come with time. Instead, functionality and information will be gradually added as articles are written and found.

Everyone is welcome to contribute to the wiki and to add their tips and information . You are also welcome to add new tools and new articles.

Expect more integration between the blog and the wiki as time goes on and my coding skills improve. In the meantime, I hope you get some utility and usefulness out of the Internet Tools Wiki!

- Ben

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For the last few days, I’ve been working on some design and functionality features of BenParr.com. I’m nowhere near done, but I’m ready to release a new section of BenParr.com: The Internet Tools Wiki

The Internet Tools Wiki is a project designed to aggregate the most useful information on the internet regarding internet tools and social media. What does that mean? It means that, unlike Crunchbase or Wikipedia, which are focused on general, non-biased information about companies and products, the Internet Tools Wiki is chiefly concerned with effective utilization of these products and aggregates the most impressive articles and community knowledge to that end. In the next few weeks and months, you can expect blog articles to coincide with wiki articles, for articles across the net to be added to the Internet Tools Wiki Database, and for more and more tools to be added over time.

The information you will find on most of the wiki pages:

• A Brief Description of the internet tool, no more than two sentences
• A Value Proposition explaining why you should use the tool, no more than two sentences
• BenParr.com Articles, an aggregate of all relevant articles on improving your use of an Internet tool from the BenParr.com blog
• Other Featured Articles, a collection of articles from myself and the community on how to best utilize each Internet tool.
• Community Advice, the section where users can place their tips, tricks, and information on how to best utilize Internet tools.

The wiki is currently bare bones and does not have proper information for most internet tools - That will come with time. Instead, functionality and information will be gradually added as articles are written and found.

Everyone is welcome to contribute to the wiki and to add their tips and information . You are also welcome to add new tools and new articles.

Expect more integration between the blog and the wiki as time goes on and my coding skills improve. In the meantime, I hope you get some utility and usefulness out of the Internet Tools Wiki!

- Ben

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Hold onto your obvious judgment for a moment while I explain what I’m talking about.

So as many of you know, I’m not only a blogger, but also an author. I’m nearing the end of my first novel, The Eternal Sphere, which I hope to be the first of five or six books depicting a society and characters in search of redemption. I’ve been writing the novel for years, far longer than I have been blogging.

When I first started reading blogs, I immediately noticed the difference in writing styles: pithier, more images, a focus on emphasizing key point via bullets or bolding, and far less emphasis on details. This is how I write my blog articles as well. I try to highlight the key points and hit them early. You’ll find bolding and bullet points a great deal in my articles. But in my novel writing, it’s a completely different style of writing. I “see” the images, the fights, the suffering of my characters, the landscapes and I try to convey as much of that as I can to the reader. I am conveying this through dialogue and very descriptive writing.

So far, my novel writing hasn’t been drastically affected by my blog writing, but it’s tough for me to know objectively. While I do want my novel to be a bit pithier, I do not want it to be like a blog. So I started to wonder if the general blog writing and reading style, pithy and quickly scanned, is good for my overall writing.

So here’s some pros and cons of blogging towards your overall writing I came up with:

Pros

• Able to write every day - Constant writing improves your technique
• Must read others’ material to properly blog - It’s simple, the more reading you do, the better you become as a writer. More ideas, more techniques, more exposure via blogging
• Research - You’re doing constant research on the internet to write many of your posts, to find links, etc. Great also for non-fiction writing.
• Exposure to far more thoughts and opinions - What you may lose in the length and quality of some authors you gain in the quantity. Yes, seeing so many different styles helps your own.
• Exploring Topics you Love - You better be blogging because you’re passionate about a topic
• Commenting - You can get the thoughts of your readers almost instantly, something you don’t really get with other types of writing.

Cons

• Not working with plots - You’re mostly writing about news or opinion. With novels, you’re writing in arcs, plots, and longer term thinking.
• Not reading as many books - You may read more blogs, but that inevitably takes away from time you could be reading novels or other great literary works. I try to make up for this by audio books while I work out, but that isn’t a perfect substitute.
• Heavier on Images rather than imagery - When’s the last time you read a book that had pictures on every page? Even non-fiction books have fewer images than blog posts.
• Pithier writing leaves out details and nuances - You need to convey a lot more to readers in a book or a paper. In blog posts, you can simply link. Sometimes it makes for lazy writing.

I could go on with a list, but the question I posed in the title is a bit misleading. Sure blogging helps your writing, but it’s a different style of writing. The question should be: Are you able to adjust your writing style to the need, topic, and audience you’re writing to? If you can, then constant writing will get your creative and writing juices flowing. If not, then you need to concentrate on one type of writing or be more conscious about altering your style of writing for your intended audience.

As a bonus: 34 Writing Tips to help make you a better writer.

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Hold onto your obvious judgment for a moment while I explain what I’m talking about.

So as many of you know, I’m not only a blogger, but also an author. I’m nearing the end of my first novel, The Eternal Sphere, which I hope to be the first of five or six books depicting a society and characters in search of redemption. I’ve been writing the novel for years, far longer than I have been blogging.

When I first started reading blogs, I immediately noticed the difference in writing styles: pithier, more images, a focus on emphasizing key point via bullets or bolding, and far less emphasis on details. This is how I write my blog articles as well. I try to highlight the key points and hit them early. You’ll find bolding and bullet points a great deal in my articles. But in my novel writing, it’s a completely different style of writing. I “see” the images, the fights, the suffering of my characters, the landscapes and I try to convey as much of that as I can to the reader. I am conveying this through dialogue and very descriptive writing.

So far, my novel writing hasn’t been drastically affected by my blog writing, but it’s tough for me to know objectively. While I do want my novel to be a bit pithier, I do not want it to be like a blog. So I started to wonder if the general blog writing and reading style, pithy and quickly scanned, is good for my overall writing.

So here’s some pros and cons of blogging towards your overall writing I came up with:

Pros

• Able to write every day - Constant writing improves your technique
• Must read others’ material to properly blog - It’s simple, the more reading you do, the better you become as a writer. More ideas, more techniques, more exposure via blogging
• Research - You’re doing constant research on the internet to write many of your posts, to find links, etc. Great also for non-fiction writing.
• Exposure to far more thoughts and opinions - What you may lose in the length and quality of some authors you gain in the quantity. Yes, seeing so many different styles helps your own.
• Exploring Topics you Love - You better be blogging because you’re passionate about a topic
• Commenting - You can get the thoughts of your readers almost instantly, something you don’t really get with other types of writing.

Cons

• Not working with plots - You’re mostly writing about news or opinion. With novels, you’re writing in arcs, plots, and longer term thinking.
• Not reading as many books - You may read more blogs, but that inevitably takes away from time you could be reading novels or other great literary works. I try to make up for this by audio books while I work out, but that isn’t a perfect substitute.
• Heavier on Images rather than imagery - When’s the last time you read a book that had pictures on every page? Even non-fiction books have fewer images than blog posts.
• Pithier writing leaves out details and nuances - You need to convey a lot more to readers in a book or a paper. In blog posts, you can simply link. Sometimes it makes for lazy writing.

I could go on with a list, but the question I posed in the title is a bit misleading. Sure blogging helps your writing, but it’s a different style of writing. The question should be: Are you able to adjust your writing style to the need, topic, and audience you’re writing to? If you can, then constant writing will get your creative and writing juices flowing. If not, then you need to concentrate on one type of writing or be more conscious about altering your style of writing for your intended audience.

As a bonus: 34 Writing Tips to help make you a better writer.

Share This Post!

Update: Amazing response. Subscribe if you want more and watch for my new blog, TechThrill.

Not even a few months ago, Digg was on the verge of being bought out by Google or Microsoft. While those rumors have largely disappeared, the possibility (and even likelihood) of one of the two giants snatching up Digg is still prominent.

I had a debate with a friend of mine over the usefulness and future of Digg. It got me thinking about which direction Digg is headed. So I am performing a thought experiment to explore the possibilities (I love these).

What should each of these companies do with Digg if it bought the social media and user-chosen content powerhouse? Where would the integration points be and what would be the long-term strategy and direction for Digg under new overlords? And how would an acquisition affect the Internet landscape?

I’m going to start with Google (Microsoft will be next week). After that, there will be one more article about the impact of Digg on the internet.

So without further ado, here’s 7 things Google should do if it buys Digg:

1) Integrate Digg with Google News and the news algorithm

Google is a company of synergies. Utilizing its unparalleled efficiency in search in all of its products gives it a distinct advantage. Integrating your email with Google calendar keeps you on the Google servers (and makes life quite easy, too!). You get the idea.

The same would hold true for Digg if they buy it. There are many ways to incorporate Digg as the preferred social content destination of the Google empire. I’ll start off with Google News.

Google News aggregates the major news into one simple and efficient interface. But its relevancy and popularity rankings for stories of similar topics can always be improved and Digg would help in that endeavor.

Yes, the male-skewed demographic of Digg may not be the best source of demographic information for Google News, but it is a good indicator of the popularity of major news stories, of the most popular article within a certain topic, and can help find more obscure stories that should be on more peoples’ radars. Also, over time, the Digg demographic would become more representative of the general internet population. See #5 below.

Google could do a few tweaks to the Google News algorithm, nothing big, to improve the rankings of news articles within categories and to bring out some of the more obscure but very interesting news of the day. Also, Digg icons next to Google news stories. News stories are what reach the Digg front page the most often, so this integration feels natural.

2) Place Digg icons in search results (but do it methodically)

Let’s get a little more controversial. Digg is the largest player in the social media space, but Digg is still small compared to the vastness of the Internet. Google isn’t though, and it can leverage that size and reach to really combine the social with the computational. Social search engines like Mahalo and Wikia Search are already beginning to fill their niches. Although it’s unlikely, it’s possible that one of these engines innovates enough to knock Google on its ass, or at least give it major headaches. Hell, just look at Microsoft’s Windows Vista and Internet Explorer.

The other thing is that people power can actually improve search results, weed through irrelevant data, and bring up the best information. To that end, if Google bought Digg, it must be committed to integrating social data into its overall data empire, and it starts with Google Search. The first step in this process would be integrating Digg into Google Search results.

Next to the “Cached - Similar pages - Note this” and other link items that appear with all Google search results, there would be a link with either “# Digg(s)” or “Digg this.” Perhaps limit it to certain topics, to sites with a previously popular story on Digg, or don’t have the Digg link appear until there’s a predetermined # of Diggs (by algorithm), but integrate Digg if you buy it, Google. Hell, Google has something similar to the Digg/Bury system in its Google Experimental Search program.

Yes, this suggestion is a bit more radical, but there’s no other way if Google buys Digg. It must expand the site, its demographic, and its influence on the web. The Digg community would be a lot larger if Google took it over.

3) Heavily tweak the Digg algorithm based on Google’s massive stores of data

Read the rest of this entry »

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Update: Amazing response. Subscribe if you want more and watch for my new blog, TechThrill.

Not even a few months ago, Digg was on the verge of being bought out by Google or Microsoft. While those rumors have largely disappeared, the possibility (and even likelihood) of one of the two giants snatching up Digg is still prominent.

I had a debate with a friend of mine over the usefulness and future of Digg. It got me thinking about which direction Digg is headed. So I am performing a thought experiment to explore the possibilities (I love these).

What should each of these companies do with Digg if it bought the social media and user-chosen content powerhouse? Where would the integration points be and what would be the long-term strategy and direction for Digg under new overlords? And how would an acquisition affect the Internet landscape?

I’m going to start with Google (Microsoft will be next week). After that, there will be one more article about the impact of Digg on the internet.

So without further ado, here’s 7 things Google should do if it buys Digg:

1) Integrate Digg with Google News and the news algorithm

Google is a company of synergies. Utilizing its unparalleled efficiency in search in all of its products gives it a distinct advantage. Integrating your email with Google calendar keeps you on the Google servers (and makes life quite easy, too!). You get the idea.

The same would hold true for Digg if they buy it. There are many ways to incorporate Digg as the preferred social content destination of the Google empire. I’ll start off with Google News.

Google News aggregates the major news into one simple and efficient interface. But its relevancy and popularity rankings for stories of similar topics can always be improved and Digg would help in that endeavor.

Yes, the male-skewed demographic of Digg may not be the best source of demographic information for Google News, but it is a good indicator of the popularity of major news stories, of the most popular article within a certain topic, and can help find more obscure stories that should be on more peoples’ radars. Also, over time, the Digg demographic would become more representative of the general internet population. See #5 below.

Google could do a few tweaks to the Google News algorithm, nothing big, to improve the rankings of news articles within categories and to bring out some of the more obscure but very interesting news of the day. Also, Digg icons next to Google news stories. News stories are what reach the Digg front page the most often, so this integration feels natural.

2) Place Digg icons in search results (but do it methodically)

Let’s get a little more controversial. Digg is the largest player in the social media space, but Digg is still small compared to the vastness of the Internet. Google isn’t though, and it can leverage that size and reach to really combine the social with the computational. Social search engines like Mahalo and Wikia Search are already beginning to fill their niches. Although it’s unlikely, it’s possible that one of these engines innovates enough to knock Google on its ass, or at least give it major headaches. Hell, just look at Microsoft’s Windows Vista and Internet Explorer.

The other thing is that people power can actually improve search results, weed through irrelevant data, and bring up the best information. To that end, if Google bought Digg, it must be committed to integrating social data into its overall data empire, and it starts with Google Search. The first step in this process would be integrating Digg into Google Search results.

Next to the “Cached - Similar pages - Note this” and other link items that appear with all Google search results, there would be a link with either “# Digg(s)” or “Digg this.” Perhaps limit it to certain topics, to sites with a previously popular story on Digg, or don’t have the Digg link appear until there’s a predetermined # of Diggs (by algorithm), but integrate Digg if you buy it, Google. Hell, Google has something similar to the Digg/Bury system in its Google Experimental Search program.

Yes, this suggestion is a bit more radical, but there’s no other way if Google buys Digg. It must expand the site, its demographic, and its influence on the web. The Digg community would be a lot larger if Google took it over.

3) Heavily tweak the Digg algorithm based on Google’s massive stores of data

Read the rest of this entry »

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(update: FriendFeed comments work again. I think there’s a time delay.)

So if you scroll down (on individual posts), you’re going to find something new: FriendFeed comments appear on my blog! FriendFeed, the rapidly rising lifestreaming service, allows you to comment on any item that comes through FriendFeed. Some blog posts and twitter comments can have 50+ comments, and that number is rapidly rising as more and more people sign up for FriendFeed.

Well today I stumbled upon this post on FriendFeed by Chris Pirillo that he had added FriendFeed comments to his blog via a Wordpress plugin by Glenn Slaven

Glenn, thank you.

Now as you can see, any comments on this post (or any post) via FriendFeed will appear under my normal Disqus comments. Plus, you can post to FriendFeed via my blog. Disqus, a customizable and dynamic blog commenting software, is what I use to run comments on my blog currently and I couldn’t be happier.

But with FriendFeed comments on blogs, I wonder: Could it compete with Disqus? And then I wondered: Could this be the start of something bigger?

First on Disqus: One of Disqus’s main advantages is that you can track the comments of someone you like across multiple blogs. Another is that it can help build community around comments via a “community page” hosted on disqus’s servers.

My argument is that FriendFeed performs both of those functions better. You can track a person’s comments on blog posts via FriendFeed. Hell, you can track a person’s Disqus comments via your FriendFeed too. Now that those comments appear on blog pages, everyone can see them too! A person doesn’t even have to join FriendFeed, already a more popular service than Disqus, to see what a person they like is saying on not only blogs, but on YouTubes, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It’s far more dynamic of a tracking system than Disqus.

The second, on community: You can build community around FriendFeed. You can encourage people to visit your FriendFeed blog posts (it’s real simple to give a link that only shows your FriendFeed blog posts) and to comment via FriendFeed OR the blog. I may very well make FriendFeed my “message boards,” so to speak.

Of course, you have to sign up for FriendFeed to comment via FriendFeed, which of course makes regular commenting much easier to use. But as more and more use FriendFeed, you’re going to see more and more people comment via FriendFeed rather than Disqus, Wordpress, or any other commenting system. That could be bad news for Disqus, but good news for the rest of us.

As more people install this plug-in and integrate FriendFeed comments into their blogs, there may very well be a dynamic shift in how FriendFeed is used and perceived. Hell, this could be the beginning of a movement that makes FriendFeed mainstream. This grants FriendFeed more exposure and leaves people who are not currently part of the FriendFeed universe with a desire to be heard (one that can only be fed by joining FriendFeed.

FriendFeed comments on blogs is a game changer, people.

- Ben
(By the way, I encourage you to comment on this blog via FriendFeed and then to follow me!)

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(update: FriendFeed comments work again. I think there’s a time delay.)

So if you scroll down (on individual posts), you’re going to find something new: FriendFeed comments appear on my blog! FriendFeed, the rapidly rising lifestreaming service, allows you to comment on any item that comes through FriendFeed. Some blog posts and twitter comments can have 50+ comments, and that number is rapidly rising as more and more people sign up for FriendFeed.

Well today I stumbled upon this post on FriendFeed by Chris Pirillo that he had added FriendFeed comments to his blog via a Wordpress plugin by Glenn Slaven

Glenn, thank you.

Now as you can see, any comments on this post (or any post) via FriendFeed will appear under my normal Disqus comments. Plus, you can post to FriendFeed via my blog. Disqus, a customizable and dynamic blog commenting software, is what I use to run comments on my blog currently and I couldn’t be happier.

But with FriendFeed comments on blogs, I wonder: Could it compete with Disqus? And then I wondered: Could this be the start of something bigger?

First on Disqus: One of Disqus’s main advantages is that you can track the comments of someone you like across multiple blogs. Another is that it can help build community around comments via a “community page” hosted on disqus’s servers.

My argument is that FriendFeed performs both of those functions better. You can track a person’s comments on blog posts via FriendFeed. Hell, you can track a person’s Disqus comments via your FriendFeed too. Now that those comments appear on blog pages, everyone can see them too! A person doesn’t even have to join FriendFeed, already a more popular service than Disqus, to see what a person they like is saying on not only blogs, but on YouTubes, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It’s far more dynamic of a tracking system than Disqus.

The second, on community: You can build community around FriendFeed. You can encourage people to visit your FriendFeed blog posts (it’s real simple to give a link that only shows your FriendFeed blog posts) and to comment via FriendFeed OR the blog. I may very well make FriendFeed my “message boards,” so to speak.

Of course, you have to sign up for FriendFeed to comment via FriendFeed, which of course makes regular commenting much easier to use. But as more and more use FriendFeed, you’re going to see more and more people comment via FriendFeed rather than Disqus, Wordpress, or any other commenting system. That could be bad news for Disqus, but good news for the rest of us.

As more people install this plug-in and integrate FriendFeed comments into their blogs, there may very well be a dynamic shift in how FriendFeed is used and perceived. Hell, this could be the beginning of a movement that makes FriendFeed mainstream. This grants FriendFeed more exposure and leaves people who are not currently part of the FriendFeed universe with a desire to be heard (one that can only be fed by joining FriendFeed.

FriendFeed comments on blogs is a game changer, people.

- Ben
(By the way, I encourage you to comment on this blog via FriendFeed and then to follow me!)

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