Users will get notifications anytime they get a new follower or like.

When you have the extension installed, it will display a follow button whenever you’re on a site with RSS feeds, so you can easily follow it from your WordPress.com account. This includes not only WordPress sites, but blogs on Blogger, Tumblr, etc.

There’s a “press this” button, which lets you quickly post content to your blog without having to actually go to it. This gives you a box that looks like this:

It will even let you post an excerpt of text with a link by highlighting what you want to post before you click the button. Like I said: handy.

I don’t know that a stock image bank reflects society’s opinions on bloggers and journalism, but I found the search results amusing, and thought it would be fun to share.

If you search “blog,” “blogging,” or “blogger” you get these results:

That’s it. Really. That’s literally every result that comes up.

For “journalist,” there are seven pages of photos. I’m not going to include them all, but here is a sampling:

So, what are the takeaways here?

Bloggers are basically teenage girls with computers. Journalists don’t use computers. They use typewriters, paper, or appear on TV.

I guess the line between blogger and journalist isn’t so gray after all.

First Syria’s government banned virtually all foreign media from the country then, just last week, attempted to suppress citizens’ ability to dispense updates and footage of events to the world by banning anyone from possessing an iPhone. Ghazzawi’s last post on her blog before being arrested elated that fellow Syrian blogger, Hussein Ghrer, had just been released by the Syrian authorities after being detained for 37 days.

Twitter users have demonstrated their support by changing their userpics to a photo of Ghazzawi as well as unifying their support with the hashtag #FreeRazan:

In spite of the Syrian government’s outright aggression against reporters, Ghazzawi maintained her blog under her real name – a point that some have speculated made her a vulnerable target. In what could only be regarded as a deeply grim irony, that Ghazzawi’s disappearance should become a rallying point contrasts with the pragmatic if not humble importance she reserved for herself:

So for some reason, people think that my existence in conferences is useful in a way. The so-called “Arab Spring” is getting a lot of NGOs rich, and these NGOs must get “involved” in the revolutions that have swept the Arab-speaking region in 2011. Conferences love bloggers the most. The world still assumes that the revolution in Egypt was made by bloggers, and hence bloggers in Arab-speaking countries must be invited, because they must have some interesting role in their country, and not to mention how journalism always create “heroes” in every “crisis,” the Hollywood-style. I’ve said it many times on this blog and I am saying it again: “online activists are overrated,” and not just in Syria, but all over the MENA region. And the “social media + revolutions” is the stupidest and most irritating topic made by ignorant “experts.”

Follow #FreeRazan on Twitter for updates on Ghazzawi’s status and further developments in this story. Additionally, Mideast Youth has compiled a list of actions for supporters to do to demand the release of Ghazzawi.

In fact, if the stats Higgins quoted are anything to go by, there’s still a noticeable amount of disdain and/or ignorance concerning blogs from the perspective of these brands.

As indicated, a large portion of bloggers discuss brands in their work. According to Higgins’ numbers, the amount is around the 2/3rds mark, meaning quite a few write and discuss brands in their posts. Furthermore, 1/3 of bloggers surveyed post product reviews, and another 1/3rd post about everyday experiences at stores and their commitment to customer care. Of course, a critical post about a store’s poor customer service can be very damaging to a brand’s reputation, so perhaps that explains the rift between the two entities.

That being said, that doesn’t stop various brands from approaching the bloggers, asking them to either review or discuss a consumable item of interest. Upon review, it certainly appears as if brands view bloggers as a necessary evil, although, the same is not always true of the people writing the posts. According to Higgins’ information, in 2010, 33 percent of bloggers boycotted brands, but in 2011, that number has been reduced to 25 percent. That, however, doesn’t stop the brands from approaching bloggers, as many bloggers are cited as being approached by various brands numerous times a week.

Adding additional fuel to the “necessary evil” fire is the fact that over 60 percent of bloggers discussed in Higgins’ presentation have complained about not being treated professionally by the very brands they write about. Of course, if your blog publishes a “_____ Company Sucks” post, it’s doubtful the brand being criticized in such a manner would be very genial in their discourse, although, one could argue these brands should perhaps address the problem being written about instead of reacting negatively.

Furthermore, only 15 percent of the bloggers discussed report favorable interactions with various brands, whereas 34 percent say these experiences unfavorable.

So what does all this mean? Should bloggers ignore brands altogether and focus on creating other quality content? Not necessarily. Being an authority in the field you are targeting means knowing about and discussing those entities who have influence within the same field. If your posts ruffles some feathers, then you’re probably doing it right — unless, of course, you are writing about falsehoods and/or are making up lies about the brand being criticized.

For 5 years, WebProNews has partnered with BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the world’s first and largest new media conference, in an effort to broadcast how new media can grow your business, brand, and audience. Stay tuned to WebProNews for much more exclusive coverage.

Have you ever been on either side of this situation? Tell us your experience.

While there are blogger outreach platforms that offer some assistance to this dilemma, they are known for having their own set of problems. For example, services such as Vocus and Cision have been around for a long time but are often discredited for being too big. As a result, they have trouble keeping their databases current.

This is where new blogger outreach platform BlogDash comes into the game. The platform hopes to connect both businesses and bloggers/journalists in a way that brings both parties benefits.

“The idea behind BlogDash is to create an open communication platform so that all the needs and expectations from bloggers and businesses are matched up,” said David Spinks, Co-founder of BlogDash.

Bloggers and journalists create bios that include their experience, what they write about, how often they write, and other noteworthy facts. BlogDash uses this data to match businesses with media that have the same goals.

To avoid facing the volume challenge that others deal with, Spinks said that BlogDash would keep its focus set on building a good product. In addition, it plans to obtain the most accurate data and the highest-quality bloggers.

These media databases also raise another potential issue in regards to the responsibility of PR professionals. Although solutions such as BlogDash can be very useful for media and PR professionals, some people who work in PR tend to rely too heavily on the results in the database and slack on their own research. Have you noticed this trend?

It seems those controversies won’t be dying anytime soon, although recent developments do appear to place more of an emphasis on increasing the quality of content (not that quality has been much of a problem among AOL’s content properties thus far). AOL’s TechCrunch reports on a conference call Peter Goodman, editor for business and technology news for the Huffington Post held with freelancers, saying that the company is looking to turn the freelancers who are actually professional journalists (as opposed to bloggers) into staff writers. Leena Rao reports:

Goodman encouraged all of the call attendees to apply for full-time jobs with the Huffington Post Media Group and reiterated that the new group is “ultimately about greater journalism.”

…

One interesting quote from Goodman, “We can’t replace professional journalism with an ad hoc blogging arrangement….we don’t want to confuse professional journalists with bloggers.” Non-professional journalists (perhaps bloggers churning out content for the AOL Way?) from what we heard, are being encouraged to freelance.

The comments are quite interesting, given the increasingly blurred lines between journalists and bloggers these days. This is a subject we’ve talked about in the past. There are plenty of “bloggers” doing just as much (if not more in some cases) investigative reporting than some of the so-called journalists out there. In many cases, it’s getting tougher and tougher to distinguish. If you’re looking at credentials/degrees, that’s one thing, but it’s not necessarily indicative of the quality of reporting.

While many of the Huffington Posts’s “journalist” freelancers will no doubt be enthusiastic about the opportunity, I’m guessing some of the “bloggers” won’t be quite as thrilled.

Either way, the move does seem to show a commitment to high quality journalism, even if the theories behind the move are a bit skewed. On the other hand, the Huffington Post seems to be pretty good at what it does.

Financial analysts seem pretty high on the AOL way these days as well.

The developers of SocialDitto, part of iEntry (which also publishes WebProNews) thought a Blackbird Pie-like tool would be useful for Facebook posts, given that a lot of interesting content is shared on Facebook, arguably even more so than Twitter given its size.

Let’s say you were writing a story about the Super Bowl, and wanted to provide a Facebook update from the winners in your story. You could simply find a post on the Packers’ Facebook Page…

The app, which can be found here on Facebook, will add itself as an option in the left-hand column while you’re on your newfeed page. That way, it is always conveniently at your disposal, should you find an interesting update you wish to share.

Then grab the URL of that post (from the timestamp), paste it in the SocialDitto box, and click the “ditto” button to get the embed code…

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You can put out press releases and just sit there and hope your stories get picked up and/or read by customers, but it helps if you optimize them for those who are most likely to be interested.

Nida Haque, Marketing Manager of PRWeb spoke with WebProNews recently about press release optimization. "Do your keyword research," she says. "Don’t use words that are just on your website. Do the searching before it and see what people are searching for."

"Be a little creative," she adds. "See what’s happening in the season." She cites Black Friday as an example. A lot of people are searching for Black Friday deals ahead of Thanksgiving, which presents opportunities to take advantage of that from within press releases, because press releases can be pretty powerful for search. 

Lisa Buyer, CEO of The Buyer Group told us, "It used to be with public relations that we were reaching out to the journalists with a press release and trying to get the journalist to do the story, and now with the optimization and the online opportunities with press releases we can actually reach our targets direct by optimizing our press releases and releasing them on the search engines, and then using social media to even get more exposure." 

She also shared some thoughts on the added value press releases can get from Twitter. "You can use Twitter…as part of your PR program, as part of your news feed, so Twitter is like basically…we all know it’s 140 characters so it’s like putting out little nuggets of news via Twitter, so if you take your press release and kind of chop it up into four or five different sound bytes, and then put those out…over the Twitter news feed each day…" 

Of course press releases aren’t just about search and social media traffic. You want press. You want journalists and bloggers to pick up stories and really get them spread around. Well there are ways to get them to pay attention more. First, obviously, you need an interesting product or announcement, but it also helps if you give the blogger/journlist something else to latch onto. A lot of details help, but so do visuals. 

"48% are more attracted to video news releases or image news releases than just your standard kind of text-only news releases, so that will definitely help a lot," says Haque, who notes that using multimedia in press releases also increases the time spent on page by an average of 30 seconds when it comes to customers viewing the release themselves. 

Lee Odden of TopRank marketing had some good advice on getting releases in front of journalists in another interview with WebProNews earlier this year. He says to look at what it is you can do as a marketer to make it easier for the journalist to do their job. Optimize your content for what a journalist is looking for. 

“This new offering on our studios platform expands our mission of publishing high quality content at scale," says Stewart Marlborough, GM of Demand Media Studios. "We are already a leader in publishing original, actionable, evergreen content. With the addition of the Demand Media Blog Network, we broaden our content offerings to include timely, topical and opinion-based content from the best of the blogospshere. Now highly-qualified bloggers will have the opportunity to extend their individual brands to the millions of people that visit Demand Media’s websites and those of our partners.”

Demand Media pitches the Blog Distribution Network as a way to help boggers be more successful by giving them the tools and distribution they need to effectively expand their audience and build their brands. The flyer the company is handing out at their exhibit promises:

Also at the event, we spoke with John Hewitt, who ran a session on how-to articles (the premise of Demand’s eHow.com), about how the average blogger can compete with companies like Demand Media and Yahoo’s Associated Content (which is also represented here at the show). He simply said to make your content better, because frankly, the stuff that you’ll find on Demand’s properties isn’t always of the highest quality (not that this is the case with all of the their content). Demand has discussed its plans to make this better numerous times throughout the year, and the company appears to be taking the subject very seriously. 

It will be interesting to see the kind of content that gets picked up through the Blog Distribution Network. I spoke with a couple reps at Demand’s booth, who told me that they’ll have editors going through all the content submissions and overseeing the approval process. They will not accept any obscene content, as they’re looking to keep it family friendly. They also told me they’re only interested in blogs that are updated regularly. 

Some of the folks trying to learn about writing good how-to articles may actually find applying for this program to be a better alternative to trying to compete with eHow. 

Either way, its clear that Demand Media is building an army of content producers. If you thought they were already doing this, you can only imagine how much this blog syndication will take things up a notch.

"Blogger also has a Share link in the navbar, but for improved convenience you can now have share buttons below the post (we also gave them nice rollover icons)," says Blogger software engineeer Jiho Han. "For Twitter, we’ve also integrated the goo.gl URL shortener to give you the maximum space in the Tweet to add your own remarks."

"You can start having the new share buttons show up under your posts by editing the Blog Posts widget and enabling Show Share Buttons in Design | Page Elements," adds Han.

Buttons like these are nothing new, but having them readily available on Blogger could go a long way in helping bloggers using the service to boost their traffic. People are more likely to share content when it’s as easy as clicking a button. That’s why Facebook’s social plugins are so popular.