#WordPress Plugin Semantically Analyses Posts for Keywords

Posted by jameswdcrawford on February 5, 2010 under Media | Be the First to Comment

Wordpress plugin geekery

If you don’t use WordPress then I suggest you don’t read any further as this is a HUGELY GEEKY post. ***WARNING***

I am testing a new WordPress plugin by Roger Stringer, which “Yahoo Query Language to perform semantic analysis of your post text and suggest tags for you.”

I have written this post to test how it works. I’ll let you know if it useful! Here is a link to Roger and his blog.

http://www.rogerstringer.com/2010/02/03/wordpress-plugin-yql-auto-tagger/

Roger also created a news curation plug in which I have used. Clever chap.

PR and Social Media Links – 16 January

Posted by jameswdcrawford on January 16, 2010 under Media | Read the First Comment

Here are a few links to interesting articles which I found this week

Excellent Resources Help You Create Your Own Social Networking Site
This is very geeky reading but there are some excellent tools, tips and plugins here for the digital and web savvy social media professional

How To Rank Top In Google
Nice summary of SEO, should you need to explain it to a client or marketing contact

List of The Top Free Press Release Sites — Moola Days
Public Relations professionals can argue whether news agencies are useful or not for securing press coverage, but what you can’t deny is that this blog has the most definitive list

20 Real-World Uses for Google Wave
What I like about this post is that it doesn’t get carried away and gives real, tangible uses. Any PR professional who has read up on Google Wave will have come across these uses before. However too often Google Wave blogs talk about the platform like it is a cure for cancer, while this post reiterates the most useful functionality

My self-hosting experience and advice (WordPress)

Posted by jameswdcrawford on November 27, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

WordPress is, for me, the number one social media platform, and it is not just me that thinks this, according to recent reports.

I took my blog ‘self-hosted’ this week, an action which coincided with a report in Techcrunch that highlighted a boom in blogging compared to micro-blogging.   

Personally I think Twitter is responsible for this boom because for millions of users like myself the service is the gateway to finding the best blogs on the blogosphere, inspiring others to take up writing.  Also, the demise of Twitter is much over reported.  Yes, growth in visitor numbers to Twitter.com has flattened, but who visits the site anyway?  Most of us use Tweetdeck or another sort of client.

But, alas, I digress….

I wanted to write this post to celebrate the beauty of taking your blog self-hosted, share some of the highs and lows, and to thank @vinceapplemac who helped me.

Hopefully this post will prove useful to someone else going through the self hosting process. I’m better at developing content than technical geekery, and I guess there are lots of people like me, who could find this post useful.

Firstly, I decided to use WordPress.org as a content management system (CMS), because the tool is itself a form of social media and there is huge interaction with other bloggers on the platform and beyond.  The ‘social’ aspect of blogging platforms are often much overlooked because many just consider blogging as another form of publishing. WordPress.com was simply brilliant because it is so ‘social’. I think .org is even better in this respect, so think wisely before choosing your CMS!

I also chose WordPress.org because it has much wider functionality than WordPress.com, which was so easy to use when I was starting out.  The .org version is even better because there is added fun to be had via a myriad of plug-ins.  The plug-ins cover everything from widgets for buttons to LinkedIn , through to SEO optimisation .  There is a widget for everything. 

Next I bought a domain name, storage space on a server which sounds complicated, but is in fact easier than buying your shopping from Tesco.com.

Being a PR person, I am much better at the content side than the technical aspects, so I sought the counsel of @vinceapplemac , who linked WordPress.org to my domain and migrated the content from my existing blog to the new site.  Vince tells me this process is also easy, but it was a bit complex for me, so I recommend seeking some help for this step.

The next few days were spent setting up functionality, playing around with the plug-ins and reading up on some of the differences between .org and .com. 

I also found this resource which I think people will find useful.  The presentation is for beginners, but I guess some people reading this will be beginners too and might find it useful:

I hope this was helpful for you!

Should Journalists Blog?

Posted by jameswdcrawford on October 27, 2009 under Journalism | Be the First to Comment

We, on behalf of The Carphone Warehouse, are beginning to undertake a project to encourage journalists to blog. I’ve only been blogging for the past five months but have found the whole process very rewarding. Hopefully a few journalists will start blogging who never thought they would!

They are better placed than me to come up with compelling content!

This presentation starts off slowly but by slide seven there is some good content. I should also say it is not my presentation, but lifted from Slideshare.

[slideshare id=1050992&doc=UsersjwilpersDocumentsConsultingINTERNSHIPPresentationsShouldJournalistsBlogJohnWilpers-090220062104-phpapp01]