We have developed a fun new tool for bloggers to get their blog posts noticed and to help you drive more traffic to your blog!

What is "Blink It for blogs"?

"Blink It for blogs" is a simple tool that we developed to help your blog readers blink their favorite blog posts to BlinkList with one easy click. Your blog readers can now blink any specific post / entry into their BlinkList account and share it via email and on BlinkList with many other users.

What are the benefits of adding this to my blog?

There are two key benefits.

1) The "Blink it" button encourages people to add your blog post to BlinkList. This will greatly help you to get your posts noticed on BlinkList since posts that a lot of users blink can make it into the "Hot Now" and "Most Popular" sections. So, if people blink your posts, you are far more likely to get more traffic coming back to your blog.

2) The "Blink it" button makes it very easy for people to share and email your post to other people. Currently, the "email this post" options on blogs are very tedious because users have to first fill out their email addresses and also the email addresses of their friends. Well, when people just "blink it" to share and email your post, they don’t have to enter their own email address and even better, if they are a regular BlinkList user, then we already have their friends email addresses saved as well. This way emailing good blog posts is finally fun and easy because users don’t have to remember or enter any email addresses.

How do I install / add this feature to my blog?

Easy, just copy and paste a few lines of code into your blog!

Below we give you the exact code you will need and tell you exactly where you need to copy and paste the code into your blog template. The instructions vary a little depending on the blogging software you use.

Blogger / Blogspot integration: click here

Other blogger tools (word press, typepad, etc.): click here

blinklist del.icio.us search social social+bookmarking tagging

Over the past few weeks, we have quietly rolled out the long awaited "Advanced Search" capabilities. Many of you already discovered this hidden feature just by trying to use the plus sign. Very clever! We often roll out features without highlighting them so that we can start to test them on our site.

However, the time has come to make this easily available to everyone. Advanced search allows you to use AND, OR, and NOT to refine your search queries. We use the symbols +, |, and ! to do this. No worries, you don't have to remember this now. We highlight it on the site if you want to start taking advantage of it.

Please keep your thoughts and ideas coming so that we can keep making BlinkList better and better.

Mike

PS: It looks like del.icio.us finally released a global search box on their site today but it does not yet offer advanced search features like AND. >> Del.icio.us expands search

blinklist del.icio.us search social social+bookmarking tagging folksonomy

We have been working so hard on BlinkList, that I have not even had the chance to really take the time and write about all of the new features and improvements that we have been working on.

Well, turns out I don't need to do this anymore because Solution Watch just prepared an a detailed review that highlights all of the hot new changes we have been making.

So, if you want to learn more just check out their excellent write up here.

Of course, even better would be if you took a look yourself on BlinkList and let us know your thoughts.

Ok, I am off to go to a party myself now to take a break from work and celebrate a little.

Mike

social+bookmarking social bookmarking tagging social+software blinklist tags folksonomy bookmarks bookmark+manager

This quick survey is an attempt to figure out what people love or dislike about their Social Bookmarking Manager. The idea is to collectively share data on what we need to do to push this phenomenon to the mainstream public. Take part in the survey and you get to see the results.

Today we rolled out another new face lift to www.blinklist.com. We hope you like the changes that we have implemented on the site. The vast majority of all changes came about due to user feedback!

We wanted to make social bookmarking and online discovery even simpler, easier, and more fun.

Thanks for continuing to send us tons of emails on a daily basis. Your level of support and enthusiasm is fantastic. Keep it up and please let us know what you think of our latest improvements.

I am sure there is plenty we have missed and plenty more to do. We are working on some additional site improvements that we are super excited about and continue to work hard to keep making BlinkList better and better.

Mike

blinklist social+bookmarking bookmarks bookmarking tags tagging folksonomies tag+fragmentation

Emily from eHub shared some great user statistics on how her blog has been progressing over the past month. Her success has been nothing short of stellar.

eHub and the social web:
1796 users have bookmarked eHub at del.icio.us.
568 diggs at digg.com
36 blinks at BlinkList.

Looks like del.icio.us still has a commanding lead over us. That is not surprising given that we are just getting started.

Mike

ehub emily web2.0 web+2.0 blinklist del.icio.us

Yeah! We have made it to the next stage of BlinkList. I have to say that we have some incredible developers on our team and all the credit goes clearly to them. If there are things you don't like on the site then it was probably me and not them.
Hannu and Jiangti have been super busy and done a tremendous job. Over here we are all excited to present to you a whole new and improved BlinkList.

Come and check out the latest version of our site and please do let us know what you think! We hope to hear from you so that we can learn what you like, what you don't like, what features to add, what features to remove and how to keep making BlinkList more exciting and better and better.

Plus, while we might have to take a few days of rest from coding, we have lots of exciting improvements and enhancements on the way. So, don't think we are finished yet. There is lots more to come! Happy blinking!

If you would like to check out a detailed list of our site updates you can find them here: Latest Site Updates

Mike

blinklist social+bookmarking folksonomies tagging social+search social+software social+networking

Scoble and Danny are having quite a rant about "The Perfect Search Engine" and one of the things that they want is better query refinement.

Robert Scoble Wants What We Had -- Better Query Refinement. So Do I!

One of the things that Danny points out is that search engines used to be better in the early days when companies like Ask Jeeves and MSN employed editors to help people find what they want and to help people further refine their search queries.

The reason all of the major players stopped is because hiring people is expensive. Well, here is an idea. Why not turn anyone into an editor? That is the direction we have decided to take with BlinkList. On BlinkList, anyone can submit links today and tag them (identify them with keywords, queries). Do we have to stop there? No, you will shortly see what we mean...

As we start to aggregate the knowledge of domain experts, I suspect we might be able to offer some pretty clever query refinements and a whole new way to discover content online. Already we offer an intuitive tag cloud that helps people refine their query. If you are looking for "Ajax" for example, type in "Ajax" into BlinkList and you will see a tag cloud of the most related tags (queries) to help you drill deeper.

Can an active community of users create the human touch search engines are missing? We hope so. One other benefit of leveraging a community is that we might be able to do all of this without incurring the costs that Ask Jeeves and MSN had to absorb because we have a community of volunteers and a community that is using BlinkList for their own self interest, to discover more interesting, relevant content, andn to have a place to access ad retrieve it quickly.

Time will tell if we can execute against this vision but so far we are very excited and optimistic about the future potential.

Mike

PS: By the way, give us another week and then you will start to see some major improvements that will give you a good glimpse of what we are talking about. We hope we will be taking a big step to creating a new kind of "Personal Discovery Engine" for the Internet.

perfect+search scoble scobleizer danny search+engine+watch Google MSN Ask Jeeves search editors queries social+search social+software