Welcome to Web Currents, a digest of web trends and tips for BlogMasters, podcasters, and webmasters. We'll review tools and techniques, learn about color in web design, and examine a new AJAX tools site. We'll wrap things up with a way to keep people at your websites.
Podcast Marketing, WordPress and AJAX
Do you think using podcasts for marketing is important? We took a poll on the subject (see below), and it appears that a number of savvy web developers are using podcasts as part of their marketing mix. Mr. Nicosia points out in an article at WebHelperNow that Apple has sold 40 million iPods since 2004 (when they were introduced), and features podcasts prominently at iTunes. That's a huge market, not to mention all of the other ways to listen to podcasts, including through your good old PC. Write to me (see bottom of this column) if you have a podcast on web development that we should review.
Hey BlogMasters... Don't you love WordPress? Danny Wirken wrote a good overview article with a list of valuable plug-ins to extend WordPress (perhaps the leading open source blog software). We use WordPress at WebHelperNow, and love its ease of use, and well-programmed interface. Extensions only make it better, and Wirken gives you both a list of recent plug-ins (did you know there's one to enable your blog to be read on Wap-enabled cell phones?), and a list of extensions in development including a "Palm Usage Manager." The evolution continues. Two more extensions I like a lot, are the PodPress plug-in — a great publishing tool for podcasters, and the Translator extension that automatically translates your blog into eight different languages.
What principles can you steal from YouTube to help your site development work? Answering that question is the goal of an excellent article we published by Tammy Ames. Ms. Ames, in her article, focuses in on the concepts of viral marketing, visitor interaction, connection, and community. And she's right — if you can implement a site that caters to and builds on those concepts you should have a very successful web community on your hands.
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