How to make it easier for your blog readers to submit posts to Social Bookmarking sites

After some intensive testing on this Blog today, I have now added a Bookmark option at the bottom of all posts on each of my three blogs.

The button is provided by addthis.com and allows people who use social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit to easily submit a post to the respective services.

I have never been a user of Social Bookmarking services, however I can definitely see a value in making use of them. The ability to share bookmarks with others, and vote on the quality of articles is great. According to some reading I did earlier today, search engines such as Google and Live! Search will give these sites a lot of weighting when delivering search results.

Time will tell whether of not this facility will boost any traffic to my blogs. I have submitted about a dozen blog posts which I consider some people may be interested in. I also submitted a couple of my YouTube videos as well for experimentation.

When you submit a video to Digg, it appears to take a snapshot from the video for inclusion in the Digg. However, it does not correctly pick thumbnails when I use the nz.youtube.com/blahblah prefix. It works when I use www.youtube.com/blahblah. An oversight on Digg's part.

Link to Addthis: http://www.addthis.com

Google Video Bar

A few months back, I found a wizard on Google which allowed you to embed a videoroll of YouTube videos onto your website or Blog.

The key feature which grabbed my attention was the fact that you could just limit the shown videos to your own YouTube Channel. The embedding option that Blogger provides doesn't let you control this.

After months of searching, I have found the wizard again at:
http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/wizards/videobar.html

I'm now looking at embedding the "Video Bar" (as it is called) in my website, and/or on my blog.

Google Analytics Statistics

On a regular basis, I will Google myself to determine my own site rankings when my name is searched for. I believe that Google Analytics over-calculates the number of visitors to my site in Google search. I believe that a pre-fetching feature within Firefox in conjunction with Google is causing this.

Firefox and Google have a feature whereby it will actively pre-fetch and cache your first few search results into your browser. What this means is that your browser will actually load up the page before you even click the link. This results in a faster connection but can also put statistics out.

Internet Explorer does not have this facility. The pre-fetching capability in Firefox can also be switched off as required.