Month: April 2011

WordPress Embeds – images and videos the natural way

Those of you who, like me, were using WordPress for a very long time, as well as those who got into WordPress recently, probably don’t know that WordPress can embed images and videos into posts and pages without using any plugins at all.  Even though there are plenty of plugins available (for example, Smart YouTube), you don’t always need them.

As per WordPress Embeds page, all you need to do is add URL to image or video in your post or page.  Just make sure that the URL stands on its own line and that it’s not linked.  Alternatively, you can use [embed] short code. WordPress supports quite a few popular sites – YouTube, Vimeo, Revision3, Flickr,  Google Video, and more.  The support is based on the oEmbed format.

Of course you’ll get more power with specialized plugins, but for many bloggers out there this built-in support will be more than enough.

Recommendation engine that finally makes sense – Google +1

I’ve heard plenty of rumors about an upcoming Google social network.  I have no idea if they are true, and really I don’t care.  I have enough social networks as it is.  But what I haven’t heard about until now is Google +1 – a new recommendation engine that Google is trying out.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAyUNI3_V2c]

At first, when I read about Google +1 and that it was yet another attempt for recommendation engine for Google search results, I didn’t think it was interesting at all.  There were a number of tries in that area – some of them long gone, some still alive.  I’m talking about results reordering via drag-and-drop, starring of result items, and others.

All of them shared the same problem – promoting items from within search results doesn’t work very well, because the user hasn’t yet visited the page itself.  He’s eager to navigate away from the results.  And on top of that, page title, description, and a thumbnail aren’t always enough to make a judgement.

On the other hand, recommendation engines are doing pretty well with social networks like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and others.  Every other page on the web has a share button that supports one or more social networks.  And people use those.  Even though sharing pages on Facebook and Twitter might be useful, it isn’t as useful as increasing the karma of those pages in order to rank them higher in your future search results.

That’s where Google +1 comes in.  It makes perfect sense.  Now you can search Google, visit the results, and +1 those of them that you liked (and, of course, those of them that support the Google +1 sharing).  Not only it would be trivial to push those +1 to other social networks, but also now users have way more stimuli to share things, since that would improve their own search results.

Google +1 is yet available to everyone. Google will take some time to roll it out.  But if you want to try it out now, you can enable it on experimental page.