You can do some amazing things with Blogger

Guest post by David Kutcher

Editor’s note: We invited David Kutcher, an innovative web developer from Northampton MA, to write a guest blog post to share how he uses Blogger to create robust, beautiful and easy to use websites for his clients.

Hi, my name is David Kutcher. I own Confluent Forms LLC, a graphic design and custom web-based software development firm in Northampton, MA. We specialize in creating gorgeous and engaging websites with custom content management systems. As curious as it made sound, we’ve found that Blogger can be a great platform for web development when a custom CMS isn’t needed. Blogger provides a ton of functionality and design freedom for our clients, and not just for blogs!

You’re probably thinking: “what? using blog software for a website?”. I know - it sounds a bit unconventional, but it’s true.


I think that most users do not realize the value and flexibility that Blogger offers, including free hosting, complete customization, personalized domain options, WYSIWYG editor and more. Because Blogger is a Google product, you can also easily integrate with other Google services such as: Google Analytics, Google Docs, AdSense, Picasa and more. All of this is available free of charge while providing a simple, easy authoring environment for the small business owner.

As a web development firm, Blogger provides us with a different value proposition. When we pitch a Blogger-based solution to a client we can provide services at a lower price point while still maintaining full creative freedom. I don’t need to set up a paid hosting account for my client, worry about security patches or upgrades, or be concerned about system uptime and availability. Finally, I can easily transfer ownership and management of the site to my client, or, continue to keep us both as co-administrators.

It can be hard to envision a platform’s potential from a list of features so here are a few examples of what we’ve achieved with Blogger.

I hope the examples above have opened your eyes to some of the possibilities of what you can do with your Blogger site, or maybe encourage you to give Blogger a try for your website solution. A longer, more in-depth version of this post is available on our blog. My company is lucky to have an exceptionally talented designer that isn’t afraid to push us, but even if you don’t have the ability to create an entirely new site template, perhaps this will encourage you to explore the underlying code of your site and to customize some of the small details to match your vision for your site.

Happy designing and coding!

David

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Updates to Street View in Australia

Today we're excited to announce that updated Street View imagery of Australian towns and cities is live in Google Maps.



Places around Australia are now available in higher quality to help you plan your visits and show off your favourite places to friends.



Sydney Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House







Salamanca Place, Hobart



We plan to recommence our driving operations in Australia later this year, collecting new imagery from across Australia. You’ll be able to follow where our cars are operating, can read about our commitment to privacy in our blog post about the Privacy Impact Assessment for Street View activities in Australia and learn more about privacy on the Street View website.



We’re excited to publish this newer, higher quality imagery and hope you enjoy using it to explore and share Australia with your friends.



Posted by Andrew Foster, Product Manager.

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How on (Google) Earth did they do that?

Recently we’ve been seeing some really diverse uses of Google Earth by Aussies. Originally started back in 2005, Earth continues to fascinate and inspire people’s creativity more than ever and we thought we’d share a few examples that have caught our eye.




Heron Island lagoon. Image downloaded from Google Earth 13 Oct. 2010. Image date 2 Aug. 2006. Image copyright 2011 DigitalGlobe and via here.



Marine conservation and preservation

Recently, researchers in Sydney have demonstrated that Google Earth can be used as a scientific tool for discovery. Dr Elizabeth Madin and her colleagues at the University of Technology are using Google Earth satellite images to understand study vegetation patterns to learn more about how small fish and urchins hide from reef predators on Heron Island. As Madin says, "To our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has used freely-available Google Earth images to identify these features, and then actually tested them on the ground to confirm that we're seeing exactly what we think we're seeing from the satellite images”. Studying reefs from Google Earth offers great perspective: scientists have even discovered new reefs in the process!



Google Earth screenshots of some of Professor Kennedy’s finds, via here.



Archaeological Innovation: Discovering treasures from the comfort of your desktop

One of the difficulties of research and discovery in the field of archaeology is the problem of access: it’s not only expensive to travel, but often politically difficult or dangerous to do so.



Professor David Kennedy from the University of Western Australia, is using Google Earth imagery to identify stone-built archaeological sites across Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Kennedy says that aerial reconnaissance is the single most powerful tool for locating and mapping archaeological sites as it can reveal sites that aren’t visible from the ground, just by observing different soil colourations or how vegetation changes. Whether it’s finding an Afghan fortress or a meteorite crater, Google Earth enables a lot of freedom to explore and discover, right from your desktop.







Understanding our own country better

Google Earth allows you to overlay photos and information to satellite pictures, too, as a way of searching and discovering new information visually. For example, Tourism Tasmania have enabled a map of Tasmania on their site using Google Earth, which allows tourists and travellers to get information on everything from visitor information centres, to car hire facilities, tours, accommodation and attractions.



Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, and 3D buildings -- and from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean. You can create and save your own “flyovers” and map out your data. (Try it yourself here).



Google Earth isn’t just helping with new discoveries; it’s helping many scientists and non-profit organisations create powerful visualisations of the data that’s important to their cause. The visualisations they create help them collaborate better within their teams and get the word out to the public about what they’re working on.



We’d love to hear any stories you might have about using Google Earth - leave a comment below or contact us on our Twitter account at @googledownunder.



Posted by Kate Mason, Google Communications.

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New tools for handling copyright on Blogger

Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Product Operations

In keeping with Google’s public commitment to make copyright work better online, our team has been working on improving the copyright environment for bloggers and copyright owners alike. As access to the web grows, bringing new content and services online, it becomes even more important to ensure the rights of everyone involved are protected and understood. To that end, we’re happy today to announce the release of two significant improvements to Blogger’s copyright handling toolkit:

1.)  Streamlined submission tools for rightsholders. 
Working alongside industry representatives, we’ve built a better submission and handling system for our high-volume DMCA takedown submitters that simplifies the reporting process and reduces our average response time to less than 24 hours.

2.)  Streamlined counter-notice tools for users. 
Built right into the dashboard, Blogger now offers a simple way to counter-notify incoming DMCA takedown notices to blog authors who believe their content was improperly targeted for removal. This will initially be available for users receiving notices from our high-volume submitters, though we have plans to expand this to other notices down the road.

In addition, to ensure transparency around the entire system, we’ll continue to forward all DMCA notices (as well as counter-notices) to the Chilling Effects cease & desist clearinghouse where they’ll be available for public searching.

As a refresher, here is a recap of how our DMCA removals procedure works today, factoring in these two updates we’ve just announced:
  1. A blogger (let’s call him Joe Blogger) decides to post a link on his blog to a downloadable copy of Album X.
  2. The rightsholder believes the link leads to an unauthorized, infringing copy of Album X and submits a takedown notice for that specific post.
  3. The DMCA takedown notice is processed by the Blogger Team, and if determined to be a valid complaint, the post in question is reverted to draft, Joe Blogger is notified, and a copy of the complaint is sent to Chilling Effects.
  4. At this point, Joe Blogger has the right to file a counter-notice and request the post be restored if he believes the takedown was improper. He may also edit the post to remove the allegedly infringing content himself.
  5. If Joe Blogger files a counter-notice, notification will be sent to the rightsholder as well as to Chilling Effects, and after ten business days the post will be restored if the rightsholder decides not to pursue further action.
  6. Rightsholders may pursue further legal action if they deem the counter-notice sent by the user to be invalid or erroneous.
These updates are the most recent among the copyright-related improvements our team has implemented over the last two years, all intended to strike a responsible balance between the needs of copyright owners and bloggers.

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Doodle 4 Google 2011 is open! Your Future Australia doodle

Today I’m so excited to announce that we’re running our third Doodle 4 Google in Australia. We’re inviting school students in years 1-10 to sharpen their pencils, use their imagination and artistic talent to create a Google doodle depicting their vision for “My Future Australia”. The winning doodle will be shown on the Google homepage for a day for millions of Australians to enjoy.

Since 1998, when Google founders Larry and Sergey played with the corporate logo to indicate they were going to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, USA, Google’s team of doodlers has been creating doodles to celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous writers and scientists.

This year, we’re really thrilled to have judges who are incredibly passionate about children’s art and education. Judging the initiative will be National Portrait Gallery Curator Joanna Gilmour, renowned artist Del Kathryn Barton, and from Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience, CEO, Jack Manning Bancroft. These judges will select finalists across four age groups: Grades 1-3; Grade 4-6; Grades 7-8, and Grades 9-10, whose doodles will be shown online and hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. We’ll ask the public to vote on their favourite doodles from each age group and the winners will receive fantastic technology prizes for themselves and their schools, including laptops, interactive whiteboards and $10,000 worth of technology for the National winner’s school. Google’s original doodler, webmaster Dennis Hwang, will select the overall national winner to be shown on the homepage.

During July, we’re sending out information packs to every Australian school. To take part, please register your school by 26 August, and all doodles must be submitted by 23 September. Please visit the Doodle 4 Google website for a full listing of all the contest rules and information.

Posted by Lucinda Barlow, Head of Marketing, Google Australia and New Zealand

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Creator vs. Curator

Post by Lisa Ding, Community Manager

Of the blogs that I read every day, more than half are blogs that link me to news articles, websites, or other blog posts on the web. It used to be that bloggers were expected to write original content. While original content remains highly valued by many readers, it's no longer taboo to simply share things that you find elsewhere on the Internet. Followers will read your blog to see the great content that you surface. Essentially, every blog can be a small gallery of a blogger’s interests and taste.

One of my go-to blogs for Internet trends is Brandflakes for Breakfast, which states its mission is to “read the internet, so you don’t have to.” The posts are short and quippy, and the contributors work for a digital creative agency, so I trust the content that they’re surfacing will be relevant to the Internet, marketing, and branding -- some topics that interest me.


While I’m a fervent reader of blogs, I’ve struggled to post original content on a regular basis. Fortunately, I’ve discovered a couple of sharing tools on Blogger that will help me post more often. As long as I keep finding interesting things on the web, I’ll be able to use these two shortcuts to help me generate quick blog posts:
  1. Blog This! tool for Chrome: If you're using Chrome as your browser, simply install this extension and you'll be ready to write a blog post with a prepopulated link.
  2. If you want to share a post from another Blogger blog, select the ‘B’ sharing button at the end of the post. A link and blurb of the post will pre-populate, so simply type an intro, and voila! you have a new post. (Note: If you don't see the sharing buttons on your own blog, you can enable them by going into the Design tab and editing the Blog Post page element.)
A question for our bloggers: do you consider yourself primarily a creator or a curator?

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Googlers Don their Hoodies in Support of AIME

























Today Googlers are wearing their AIME hoodies to support National Hoodie Day - an initiative of the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience. This day is supporting AIME to help more Indigenous kids to finish school at the same rate as every Australian child.


Over a special lunch which was hosted by guest chef Matt Kemp, Googlers gathered together to learn more about indigenous history and culture and to send messages of support to our AIME friends and students. Googlers were excited to hear that of the 1, 250 indigenous high school students who went through the AIME programme last year 100% completed Year 12 with a further 38% heading to university! Conversations were started which focussed on the way forward and how we can help fuel the belief that a successful Australia will have as a part of it a strong indigenous voice and participation.



You can see more about National Hoodie Day here:





Posted by Leticia Lentini, Non-Profits Lead.

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Why do you blog?

Posted by Inci Atrek, User Education Specialist

Hi Bloggers,

At the beginning, life can seem a bit lonely in the blogosphere, so kudos to you for taking that first step and starting a blog. Whether your purpose has evolved over the years or you’ve stuck around for the same reasons that got you started, we truly enjoyed reading your responses to our #bloggerasks tweet on why you blog.

@CprincessUK broke it down in list form, music blogger @LinerNotes crafted a mission statement, and @fortnow blogged about blogging for Blogger’s 10th anniversary. Others of you kept your raison d’être under 140 characters. Here are a few of them, short and sweet:

“I started blogging because I loved my wedding and talking about weddings and my fiancé didn't - I needed a community” (@CMatlick)

“Main reason: creative writing outlet. Aux reasons: counteract stereotypes/preconceived ideas abt Pakistan, Pakistanis, & Islam :)” (@desigurrl)

“I started blogging after a near death experience to create a legacy for my three young children” (@FrillyHills)

“Started blogging to write about food and Flavor of Italy's culinary tourism business” (@FlavorofItaly)

Whether it’s your love of magic, to share tips on shaving, to chronicle life with the kids, or for reasons you still haven’t figured out, we want to know -- why do you blog?

Cheers,
Inci

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Update on Browser Support

Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Product Operations

Our team has been thinking a lot recently about browser support, and wanted to make you aware of our new plan moving forward. For web applications like Blogger to continue to evolve at a rapid pace, our engineering team needs to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. For example, Dynamic Views, which we previewed in March, and Web Fonts both require advanced browsers that support HTML5. Older browsers just aren’t able to provide you with the same high-quality experience.

For this reason, starting next month Blogger.com will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Blogger as well as many other Google Apps such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites.

So if it’s been a while since your last update, we encourage you to take advantage of the improved performance and security these modern browsers have to offer by installing the latest version of your preferred browser. There are many to choose from:
As the world moves more to the web, these new browsers are more than just a modern convenience, they are a necessity for what the future holds.

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Fashion blogs on Blogger

Posted by Lisa Ding, Community Manager

I wouldn’t consider myself a “fashionista,” but I do follow a good fashion blog or two.

Aside from The Sartorialist, which is one of the most frequently-viewed blogs on Blogger, I’m an avid follower of The Man Repeller. The blog is filled with photos of beautiful clothes, and I love the sassy attitude of Miss Man Repeller herself. This lady really seems to embrace the phrase “dressing for other girls.” Men, don’t worry about it.


There are quite a few popular fashion blogs on Blogger, but one thing that I’ve noticed many have in common is the use of a simple template with a customized header image. The simple template allows you to highlight the most important part of a fashion blog -- the images. And instead of have just text for a title header, you can draw readers in with a splashy colorful image that leaves a strong impression.

What are some of your favorite fashion blogs on Blogger? I’ll take some of your suggestions via comments and feature them in a future post. 

Note: Please only submit fashion blogs -- other types will be featured later. I'll be crediting the nominator, so please leave your Twitter name or blog URL. Looking forward to your suggestions!

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Want to win an Anita Borg Scholarship?

Dr. Anita Borg devoted her life to revolutionising the way we think about technology and dismantling the barriers that keep women and minorities from entering the computing and technology fields. In honour of Anita's vision, we established the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2004, awarding scholarships to women who share her passion for technology. Once again, Google is proud to announce the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in Australia and New Zealand.



Scholarships will be awarded based on the strength of candidates’ academic background and demonstrated leadership. A group of female undergraduate and graduate student finalists will be chosen from the applicant pool. Each scholar recipient will receive a $5,000 AUD scholarship towards the following academic year. In addition all finalists and scholarship recipients will be invited to an expenses-paid networking retreat to be held at Google’s Sydney Engineering centre.

Who can apply?

Applicants must satisfy all of the following criteria to be eligible:
  • Be a female student at an Australian or New Zealand university who has completed one or more years of a Bachelors degree with at least one year of study remaining, whether as part of a Bachelors or postgraduate degree.
  • Be enrolled in full-time undergraduate or postgraduate study at an university or equivalent tertiary institution (please see FAQ for details) in Australia or New Zealand for the following year.
  • Be studying Computer Science, Software Engineering, Informatics, or a closely related technical field.
Citizens, permanent residents, and international students are eligible to apply. Past applicants and finalists are also encouraged to re-apply. If you have any questions, please email anitaborgscholarsanz@google.com.



For further information on this scholarship and how to apply, check out www.google.com.au/anitaborg .

Deadline to apply: July 31st, 2011.



Thank you for your support and good luck to applicants!




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Meet Bruce, Blogger PM

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Product Manager

Hello Bloggers!

I’m relatively new to the Blogger team, but have been a Product Manager on Google’s “Geo” team since 2006, specifically for the Google 3D Warehouse. Product Managers work closely with software engineers, designers, and marketing to establish product requirements and define product features.

What initially attracted me to Blogger was the impact that it has on people’s lives. Blogs, by their very nature, enable people to express themselves. Some blogs attract our readership from an intellectual perspective, some for their entertainment value, and still others stir our emotions. That’s powerful stuff.

On the Blogger team I hear frequent use of the term “bloggers.” While it’s natural to generalize sometimes, what’s fascinating about Blogger isn’t the entity of a blog, but instead the interests and motivations of the real people who are behind each and every one. As human beings, we enjoy listening to and sharing stories. This is what Blogger facilitates at a fundamental level.

What I hope to gain from Lisa’s focus on Community Management is greater insight into how you are using Blogger. The deeper the understanding we have for how you use the product, the more informed we are when deciding where to take Blogger in the future.

Happy blogging!

Bruce

http://poldermanblp.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/PoldermanBLP

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Girl Geek Dinner at Google: Pink Optional

This is a guest post by Kellie Scott, Geek Girl Dinner Organiser, Sydney.



Last week, we held our quarterly Girl Geek Dinner at Google. These dinners were first started in London in 2005 by the original Girl Geek, Sarah Blow. As a software engineer, Sarah was sick of everyone at tech events assuming that she wasn’t an engineer; after brainstorming on the train home one night, Girl Geek Dinners was born. These dinners are an opportunity for women who are passionate about tech to meet each other, hear about new ideas and generally to geek out together.
Aside from everyone receiving a “I'm a woman in tech. That doesn't mean everything has to be pink” sticker, which was a big hit, we enjoyed a tasty sit-down dinner with drinks, fun icebreaker games and as always, interesting talks. The event held together by the brilliant MC skills of Amaya “that goth chick that works at Google” Booker.
The keynote speaker was Mary Gardiner talking about her work for newly-founded non-profit organisation The Ada Initiative which supports women in open technology and culture. Mary’s talk engaged the audience with some surprising statistics about the participation of women in open source communities and she discussed why it is important to increase the proportion of women in open technology and culture, before focusing on the Ada Initiative’s plans for addressing the problem. For more information, and to find out how getting women involved can change the culture of the open source community, check out her talk on the Ada Initiative website.



After dinner, we moved into our lightning talks section - talks of (roughly) five minutes each, on a variety of topics. The first talk by Kirsti Rawstron discussed gender streaming and the way it is affected by course costs. Googler Alice Boxhall followed, with a general introduction to website accessibility. Alice demonstrated a couple of websites through ChromeVox to show how hard it can be for a blind person to navigate the web. To wrap up, Googler Katie Bell spoke about the National Computer Science Summer School, and Girls Programming Network, demonstrating that it does pay to get girls into programming from a younger age. All of the talks are available here.
Girl Geek Dinner continues to grow here in Australia with other groups in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, and Perth. Our next Girl Geek Dinner will be held on Thursday 8th September. For more information please sign up here and follow us on Twitter here: @GGDSydney.

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Net speed the key to transforming lives




The web enables access and community at the touch of the keyboard: it's a radically democratic and inclusive technology. So what does unprecedented access to information and communications mean for Australia?

A BBC survey last year on attitudes towards Internet access found that Australians are among the most firmly convinced that Internet access should be a fundamental right, with 85 percent agreeing that this is the case. I believe that one of the key opportunities for Australia, now and in the future, is making smart and strategic investments in high-speed broadband. We need a world-class infrastructure to anchor our digital economy. Bringing super-fast broadband to people across Australia will open up huge opportunities for individuals, communities, and businesses.

One of the primary benefits of high-speed broadband is speed. But why does faster internet matter even more than the access we have already? The answer is this: speed drastically affects our experience of web sites and services. It turns out that we do much less online when internet speeds are slow. I know I get frustrated and leave, but even if you’re more zen than I am, traffic data shows that you will spend less time on websites when they’re slow.

According to Aberdeen Group, a one-second delay in website load time means that 11 percent more people leave a website than they would otherwise. Imagine how many leave after three or five or 10 seconds? This works in reverse, too; people spend more time on websites when they load quickly. We shrunk the Google Maps home page by 30 percent so it loaded faster; traffic was significantly more. All of these milliseconds and percentage points really add up to success or failure for businesses and website owners.

Access to broadband becomes all the more important as Australia’s companies move online and find new ways to do business and reach customers. Take, for example, livestock auction site Auctions Plus, which allows farmers to view, bid on, and transport livestock with the click of a mouse. This isn’t what usually springs to mind when we think of online shopping, but it’s a beautiful example of what the digital economy and high speed Internet access can mean.

In a country as big as this one, a site such as Auctions Plus makes a big difference to farmers, who can now buy stock from their smartphones in the back paddock and avoid a three or four day round trip to the stockyards. Or Sydney-based Freelancer.com, the world's largest outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace for small business, now with hundreds of thousands of customers around the world. These entrepreneurs have been turbo-charged by the Internet.

From health and education, to tourism and manufacturing, to resources and energy, companies who invest heavily in web technologies are statistically more successful. Small businesses who leverage the internet make up the digital economy: a platform for growth for the entire Australian economy.

There's yet another and arguably bigger opportunity where we can be pioneers and developers of this technology that will underpin future decades of economic prosperity. I believe that there's never been a better time to be in IT and to be an entrepreneur. Firstly, your audience is more connected than ever before. They are both looking for you, and are open to new opportunities to collaborate and connect.

We know that having a website, for instance, is as important as having a phone number in today's business landscape. Secondly, we now have unprecedented access to new platforms upon which to run businesses. Fifteen years ago when I founded NetMind, my first start-up company in Silicon Valley, we had to build everything. We developed almost all of our own software, built our own IT infrastructure, scaled our own servers and had no platforms upon which to monetise the business easily.

Now, in contrast you can re-use open-source components, outsource your infrastructure to a cloud provider and use online advertising tools with minimal time and money. Today, entrepreneurs can focus on the essence of their business and be very nimble: they can achieve global reach and really concentrate on the problems they're trying to solve.

I hope that budding entrepreneurs will be able to realise more and more great ideas enabled by technology. I'd like to see Australians in first place not to just take advantage of the products and services that stem from high-speed Internet, but also to be developing and commercialising them.

Fast broadband is a transformative and disruptive technology: in many ways, it's a lot like electricity. Many people didn't anticipate the myriad applications that would stem from its use until it was ubiquitous and connected to every home.

As Vint Cerf, my colleague at Google, likes to say, 99 percent of the applications of the Internet haven't yet been invented, so you can imagine the possibilities that are just around the corner. I believe that people in Australia are and will continue to be very enthusiastic about the potential of super-fast Internet connectivity.

I know firsthand that technology can change lives for the better, and faster broadband is a vital part of the technology mix to allow that to happen in Australia.

Originally posted as an opinion piece in The Australian.


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What I like about Google+

I've been using Google+ for a few days now and I'm really enjoying it. I admit that I might be a tad biased. I work for Google, but like 1/2 a billion other people I also use Facebook, albeit sparingly. I also Twitter for all of my other online "friends", as well as LinkedIn for professional contacts.

Here's the breakdown for me by social network:


I use these separate social networking sites to reflect my different social circles. In particular, unlike many people, I've strongly resisted the urge to add friends willy nilly to Facebook. People with 500 friends on Facebook are kidding themselves if they actually think that many people care about what they are doing. That said, I use Twitter for sharing with everyone, but at that scale it's typically more of a broadcast medium than a social medium, and I use it accordingly. Of course, Facebook lets you share publicly as well, but then conflates all posts into a single unmanageable stream. Finally, LinkedIn, is basically a rolodex in the cloud, but still useful for keeping track of acquaintances and colleagues.

Why have 3 social networking sites when you can have one? In the real world, we effortlessly communicate different messages to different social circles. In other words, we share information selectively. With Google+ you can now do the same thing when you're online. You can selectively share to social circles, and then keep those conversations confined to their respective circles. Family stuff for family, friend stuff for friends, work stuff for colleagues, etc., you get it.

I've just touched on one exciting feature in Google+. If you'd like to learn more about Google+, read the introductory blog post.

One last thing. If you follow me on twitter, and would like to try Google+, sign up here. I make absolutely no guarantee that you'll actually receive an invitation though.

And remember to +1 this blog.

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The best blogging advice you’ve ever received

Posted by: Inci Atrek, User Education Specialist

Hi Bloggers,

We've set out to learn more about blogging from the people who know it best -- our users. I’ve really enjoyed your responses to our #bloggerasks tweets over the past two weeks, and spent a good amount of time reading through the blogs and posts that you’ve sent us.

Something that always astounds me about blogging is how the core experience of sharing stories pulls together an incredibly diverse group of people. The emphasis you all put on connecting with each other really speaks to the power of community among bloggers.

Here are some of my favorite responses to the question, What’s the best blogging advice you’ve ever received?
  • “Write to build community; link to others and participate in the conversation” (@LisaSpangenberg)
  • “To blog consistently, respond to comments, and to read and comment on other people's blogs (especially those who read mine).” (@kelblogg)
  • “To not only be active within your own blog but on others' as well - leave comments, but don't spam!” (@OnceBittenBlog)

Although it’s important to keep your readers in mind, most of you tweeted about staying true to yourself, and writing about what you love. @Mistylovesvamps said it best: “don't be a slave to stats & followers.”

The balance between writing for yourself and becoming part of a community can be difficult at first - even a little scary - but it’s worth it. And if you’re still on the fence, consider the best blogging advice @Shakestweetz received: “Hey, you should start a blog.”

Missed our #bloggerasks? Keep an eye out for future tweets, and for my posts on your responses. Have even more blogging advice? Let us know - leave a comment!

Cheers,
Inci

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