People are still debating why Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election. It could be that he was the most qualified American citizen for the job. It could be that the country’s desperation for change outweighed everything else. It could be that he had a sick amount of cash at his disposal. Whatever the reason, one thing is crystal clear: Barack Obama and the Democrats leveraged technology like never before. They brilliantly tapped into text-messaging, e-mail, and social networking to build a base, raise money and spread ‘brand’ awareness.

In the midst of a tech revolution, it was only a matter of time for someone to take social networking beyond searching for EX-girlfriends.

Now that the election is over and the goal of an Obama White House has been met, what will happen to the president-elect’s online presence?

I’d like to hear your thoughts. Here are a few options to get you started. Do you think…

- Obama supporters will abandon their profile pages and unsubscribe from blogs.

- Obama supporters should expect their accounts to be blitzed with messages from future Dem candidates.

- Obama supporters will continue regular use of these sites. They will discuss meaningful issues, continue to donate money, and become the very agents of change they wished for.

Another thing to think about is how Obama will use technology when he is living on Pennsylvania Avenue. Will his State of the Union addresses break ratings records because supporters get a reminder on their iPhone app? Will the president’s administration use this same technology to continue two-way dialogue? We sure hope so. We now open the floor to you…

One of the topics covered in the How to Hire a Professional Blogger For Your Business session at Blog World Expo dealt with how important it is that your blog set an example if you want to be hired as a blogger. It was interesting to hear the speakers also add that if you want to hire bloggers, you better clean house as well.

The hour-long seminar featured Jim Turner of One By One Media Social Media and Professional Blogging Consultants, Gregory Go of About.com Guide to Online Business, Will Chen, editor of Wise Bread | Personal Finance and Frugal Living Forums, and Darren Rowse of Problogger. As part of this series on What Do Need to Know About Hiring a Professional Blogger and Being Hired, I want to address the issue of how to ensure your blog sets a good example and speaks well for you to help you be hired as a blogger and if you are interested in hiring bloggers.

Want Bloggers? Show Them You This is a Good Place to Blog

If you are looking to hire bloggers for your blog or blog network, you must set an inviting example.

Your blog or blog network must speak well of itself. It needs to be clean and clear in its content representation, with every element closely tied in with the overall theme and content including design, ads, blogrolls, graphics, pictures, titles, headings, and words. It needs to send a clear message of its purpose and goals.

A blog without a clear purpose sends a lot of messages to potential employees or freelancers. It says that you don’t know what you are doing. You want to send a clear message of your blog’s purpose so the blogger can evaluate the site and determine if they see a place for themselves in your blog. read more

Danville Area Community College, a small junior college located in Danville, Illinois, is following one of the latest trends - using social networking tools such as Facebook and Myspace to recruit students.

An article in today’s Danville Commercial-News tells the DACC story:

So this summer, Danville Area Community College Marketing Director Lara Conklin decided to meet prospective DACC students where they spend a lot of their time — on social networking pages.

DACC now has its own facebook.com and myspace.com sites.

The pages seem to be working.

DACC, a male, single, 61-year-old Virgo, has 65 friends, according to Myspace. Facebook lists more than 200 friends, Conklin said.

The DACC accounts were added to the social networking sites a little over a month ago, so any direct marketing success as a result has yet to be determined.

The college considers the experimental program a success so far…

If you are a member of a social networking service, it’s natural that you want to put the HTML code in your sidebar that shows off the faces or avatars of your buddies. After all, that’s what these social networking sites are all about. Your face on their blog and their face on your blog.

Is it? What good it is? How does it help your blog?

As part of this going series on WTF Blog Design Clutter, let’s look at the visual social clutter that clogs our blogs.

If your blog is a social blog, and the pictures of the folks participating on your blog might be helpful. People like seeing their faces or avatars on other blogs. Besides, it should be good link juice, right?

Maybe. read more

In 2006, I wrote about copyright violations saying that it wasn’t a matter of if but when your content would be stolen. The same premise applies to blog bullies.

It’s not a matter of if a blogger will blog bad things about you but when.

It’s going to happen. It may have already happened. It’s happened to me plenty of times. So what do you do when someone makes fun of you, pokes at you, says hurtful or harmful things about you or your blog on their blog? read more

Here’s a question. If blog comments are mini-resumes, which comments are bringing the most traffic to your blog?

When you leave a comment on a blog, there are three things at work.

1. Your desire to participate in the blog conversation and topic.
2. Your desire to increase your link credits through blog comments.
3. Your desire to encourage traffic from your comment to your blog.

A lot of pro bloggers cover the first two, but I want to explore the last one. If you really want to drive traffic to your blog through comments on other blogs, is it working for you?

Have you been paying attention to your blog referrals and incoming traffic to see where your traffic is coming from in relationship to your blog comments? It’s a very good question because we blog and comment on the premise that blog interaction helps drive traffic.
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I want to know what is really fueling your blog?

What keeps you blogging on? What inspires you to keep publishing content on your blog? What keeps you coming back for more?

Is it the blog traffic? Do you hover over your blog stats stressing out when the numbers go down and researching all the different ways you can keep pushing those numbers higher? Do you play with landing pages, blog carnivals, guest blogging, advertising, blog networks, and other ways of making the traffic keep coming in your blogging door?
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FeedCompare: Lets you do an Alexa-style compare of several blogs’ feed subscriber numbers as reported by FeedBurner. Just type the names of several blogs and you’ll get a pretty graph with lines in different colors laid over each other.

• FeedCompare

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Popular social networking site Facebook is now available in 55 different languages:

Our goal is to support Facebook in the native language of all our users and people who want to use the site. In this regard, we’ve received requests from thousands of people who want to help translate Facebook into languages beyond the sixteen released languages and the eight that are in the process of being translated.

Based on this feedback, we opened 55 new languages this week for translation by the community. Now native speakers can use our Translations application to translate Facebook into additional Asian languages (Malaysian, Vietnamese), African dialects (Zulu, Xhosa), regional varieties (British English, Canadian French) and even rarely spoken languages, such as Latin and Esperanto.

I haven’t used Latin since my undergraduate education ended - perhaps now I can try using Facebook with Latin!