Google is back into action with Google Friend Connect - another social network platform for websites (and of course blogs) without going anywhere else.

Ok, it is not just another social network as we have seen so far. As Google puts it - “Google Friend Connect provides a core set of social gadgets such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing”. And everything is there in a small java script so no coding required.

It would integrate your friends from other networks like Facebook, Linkedin, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo apart from integrating with other open social applications.

So now, you can try to connect with the end users of your website in a better way and even connect with their friends.

Google Video was a big flop and they had to buy YouTube. Now, when Yahoo has bought MyBlogLog, Google has moved forward with a highly promising network.

I agree that, Google Friend Connect is a lot different from other networks like MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog - but in essence it is also a promotional network like these two. Isn’t it?

Let’s wait and watch:

Related stories from other sources:

Tech Crunch | Yahoo News | Read Write Web | Oreilly

Saikat has just written a good post on Earth Day. It’s true; we often forget such days, we often forget what this Earth means to us.

There is no need to celebrate 22^nd April as Earth Day; everyday should be treated as Earth Day. But, it is not possible for everyone. So let’s celebrate this week as Earth Week.

Earth Week Memo:

• Let’s do whatever we can (physically) to make a mark - plant a tree, clean our locality or whatever you feel to go green.
• Let’s spread the word around - those who have blog, write a post on Earth Week; those who can design create something with the caption - go green and post it.

A contest:

We had a talk with our CEO in this regard and he is ready to “Go Green”. And so, here is a small little contest. The winner will be given a surprise gift from Softz Solutions.

1. Write a post or design something around the idea - Go Green / Earth Week and post it in your blog.
2. Write a comment in this post or trackback when you have published it.
3. The post with the maximum number of comments will be selected the winner.

Let’s spread the word around - it is as important as planting a tree yourself.

One rule - the post must be written between 22/04/2008 to 27/04/2008

So are you ready to take the memo?

Today is Earth Day. Frankly speaking I was unaware of the event until I noticed the customized Yahoo! logo last night.

Google is well-known for changing its logo on special occasions. Yahoo! and AOL are also going with the trends these days.

I gave two widely circulated newspapers a glance today during breakfast; did not find any coverage on Earth Day on a prominent place. It’s good to see that Search Engines are educating people on such a crucial topic.

Earth Day has a long history and it is better to read wikipedia to know more about Earth Day. Basically it is a day to think about our planet. Earth is our home in this universe, sooner we realize the fact the better.

However, Earth Day is not all about changing LOGO. We need to do something in real. Let’s take up an oath today. All of us reading this blog post would make Earth greener by doing at least the following things:

• tree plantation
• taking care of existing green fields
• preventing water wastage
• raising our voice to make rainwater harvesting mandatory in India

Let’s start it from today. We will come back here on April 22, 2009 to check our progress.

Blogging is now a days the latest trend on the web and also for the first time the researchers also taking interest on the wonderful world of bloggers.

Way back the studies on blog concentrated mainly on blog writers but now a day’s trend has changed. Researchers are also now concentrating on the people who read the comments and also participate in it.

Now, the researchers from the University of California have thrown light on the experiences and online habits of blog readers’. They always told that for better interactions between reader and the Blogger it is very important to understand the reader - blogger connection. Their research was based on a various aged group of 15 people who will go through the content of the blog and will have good conversation with blog writers and blogs.

Their study was interesting. They found that very few of them post comments while others only go through the content without commenting.

The study also revealed that blog reading has become a every day habit for people like newspaper reading or email checking. Readers are always keen to read the most recent post on the blog appearing on the top of the page irrespective of the age of the post.

The most of the participant don’t bother to read all the blog post because they want to remain updated with the latest post. So the bottom line posts on the screen are of least interest for the readers.

The study show that some readers took responsibility to make comments on the blog post so that they can produce good contribution on the blog.

The popularity of the blog has introduced several tools which made blog writing easy for beginners. Full Social potential of the blogging will remain untapped unless and until the technology embraces the role of the audience.

The researchers are in a hope that their studies will lead to new ways of commenting and linking.

Today I noticed an interesting thing.

I was searching for some linkbaiting tips and found this article “13 linkbaiting tips that may sell”. I knew it was written for article syndication.

I searched the title in Google.com as “13 linkbaiting tips that may sell” to find out how many sites syndicated that article. (There was nothing great in these articles being syndicated all over the web.)

But the interesting thing is that, Google showed the original site (outgoing links in that article were pointing to Vertical-Leap.co.uk) in the result page though that sentence (13 linkbaiting tips that may sell) was not there in that site’s home page.

That article used the following anchor texts:

SEO company, SEO content writing, search engine marketing

Among these three key phrase only ‘SEO company’ was pointing to the home page (others were pointing to the internal pages of that website).

I looked for the cached page of that site and found an interesting note by Google: “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: 13 linkbaiting tips that may sell” (highlighted in the image).

[Click to enlarge]

In fact the site is getting some rank for the keyword “linkbaiting tips” (within inverted comma) too.

So what is the big deal? I got some questions for webmasters:

• What about the duplicate content issue?
• While link building, we emphasize on the anchor text number of outgoing links, relevancy of other links etc. Now, should we also start considering the title of the page from where we are getting links! (‘13 linkbaiting tips that may sell’ is the title of most of the pages.)
• Should webmasters stop article promotion or should they start it with more energy?

Any idea?

Hello Friends,

Welcome to our blog at SoftzSolutions, an India (Kolkata) based SEO Company. The only thing we can promise out here is that we will try to make it “Not Just Another Wordpress Webblog” on SEO.

Perhaps we are a bit late to start this blog but once started, it will not stop. Most of us have personal blogs and a lot of them have earned enough reputation in the blogosphere. At SoftzSolutions blog, you will find a combined effort.

So stay tuned for some exciting posts.