By: Robert Wang

So you just started this whole blogging business on the side, and now streams of visitors show up at your virtual doorstep every day, demanding flash media and video content. You’re feeling ready to embrace a larger audience and maybe redesign your homepage, but aren’t really sure what direction to go.

We’ve got what you need. Barefoot Solutions has picked through dozens of articles to deliver the cream of the crop for your consumption.

BY FAR the MOST IMPORTANT component of a high caliber blog. You can’t become a rockstar without fans. Make friends with other bloggers and win over some of their traffic:
•    Link to other blogs
•    Comment on their posts
•    Feature guest writers

Most serious bloggers check Google Analytics religiously, so they’ll know, with startling immediacy, when you interact with them in the slightest way. The nice ones will pay you a visit or ideally even link you back.

From there, your glowing prose and dazzling personality will hook new traffic and grant you the worshipful readership you’ve always dreamed of.

Want the nitty gritty of link building? Vandelay Design offers 9 ways to make sure you’re linking where it counts.

This is how it’s done: VentureBeat.com - Think your page already has enough links? VentureBeat has 944,506 incoming links from other webpages. Well, 944,507 now. The staff’s amazing networking ability has no doubt played a major role in launching this page into the top 100 Technorati Blogs.

The simplest explanations are usually best. Keep it a quick and fresh. If you can’t say it in a few paragraphs, save it for another article or trim the fat.

Keep in mind: bullets, top 10 lists, and short blocks of text are your friends.

I’m confused. Examples? DaringFireball.net - Extreme minimalist design. This page only has 2 images…and one of them is a search button. The result is amazingly clean, professional, and easy on the eyes.

The more time you take to manufacturing an appealing (read: glowing, abstract, and AHDH-friendly) interface, the more likely you are to be well received.

TIP I: If you use a lot of colors it will tend to make your site look cluttered. Take a little time, pick a 2-3 color theme with good contrast, and stick to it.

TIP II: The best looking websites will take an idea and apply it to every last detail and aspect of their design. Always think about how adding or subtracting from your blog will impact your theme.

A study conducted by Dr. Gitte Lindgaard found that it takes users 0.05 seconds to decide if they enjoy looking at your site. Not sure where your page falls on the spectrum of attractiveness? Check out WebSiteOptimization.com for examples.

Emulate me: OurWorld – Winner of the Best Blog Design Weblog Award 2008. This page tactfully combines beautiful high resolution banner images with an understated low color saturation theme, sleek fonts, and hot javascript action for an amazing webpage that just sucks you in, eyes first.

According to Giancarlo Gallegos from BlogCatalog, we click because we believe we have something to gain from it—whether it is knowledge, pleasure, or LOLCATS, clicking requires a clear motive.

Give people a reason to click through to your blog by creating a unique spin on overblogged topics. To quote Dawn Foster:

“You can talk about a news story that other people are blogging about, but spend some time writing about your experiences and ideas that offer a different perspective than the rest of the crowd. Use research in new ways, interview interesting people, and talk about your experiences. By offering something new, people are much more likely to read your blog post and link to it, which is where the real SEO magic is found.”

Brush off that storyteller’s cap. Y’all got some yarn spinnin’ to do.

Now this is writing: RoughType - While the layout isn’t much to look at, Nicholas Carr’s blog is the perfect example of a content driven blog. The homepage has a mindblowing PageRank of 7.0 – this one man has accumulated the same net authority as the COMMUNITIES of Yelp and Metacafe. Be amazed.

Google Analytics and Google Webmaster are amazing for visitor tracking, sculpting page rank, and otherwise refining your blog in ways you would have never thought possible.

Once you’ve mastered the skills, you’ll be able to pinpoint the “who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, and probable “why” of every last click and page-view on your blog. Did we mention you can run customized analytics and test multiple versions of your blog simultaneously? No? It’s awesome.

If you’re looking for a nice springboard into the world of analytics, Google has graciously provided a quick tutorial to get you started. Hop to it!

Serious Skills: SethGodin’s Blog – So what’s so special about Seth Godin? His blog ranks #12 on google’s search for “blog”. While normally ranking on page 2 is sort of unimpressive, this page trumps roughly 2.3 BILLION other search results: including the official Whitehouse and Facebook blogs as well as BLOGS.COM. HE OUTRANKED A PAGE WITH BLOG in the URL. SEO. Learn to love it.

by: Robert Wang

By now you’ve inevitably heard of it. Every here and again, you hear mention of its function, little blips on the radar of the collective consciousness that is the Internet. And yet, despite the articles and buzz, people are don’t seem to be able to pick out Google Wave from a hole in the wall.

At first glance Google Wave is every marketing executive’s wildest fantasy come true. The service is exclusive, offered by media darling Google, and the description is so laden with buzzwords that it seems like a sure-fire win. Unfortunately in the process of self promotion, Google has overwhelmingly succeeded in making themselves a product that borders on impossible to describe and to some extent, comprehend.

To give some sense of just how brain wrenching the project is, consider the following: Google published a tutorial video in an attempt to explain its brain child. At just a shade over an hour and 20 minutes, the video is roughly the length of your average romantic comedy. Regrettably, by the end, most viewers would still be hard pressed to summarize the service in a sentence or less.

Google Wave was released under the same invite program that helped build up hype for Gmail. Currently there are roughly 100,000 users testing the service, however, new users can only register through invitations they receive from current users or Google itself.

Consistent with Google’s previous policy, Wave is an open source project—meaning it will be increasingly more customizable and polished over time. So far it looks like their invitation for development has been well received. Open-sourcers are already looking to jump on the bandwagon, going so far as to bid on invitations to the service so they have a head start over their competitors.

As you read, prices for Wave invites on eBay have begun to climb. The highest offering already hangs at a steep $200 per account.

So why all the hype? Why are people paying hundreds of dollars for a service that’s still in its testing stage? Just what in the heck is this thing? In summation, users can invite other users to their “wave” which is a bit like a chat room in the sense that users can use it to communicate live. Users can submit, edit, and comment on content in the form of text, pictures, videos, Google maps windows, or even games. Everything is updated on a near realtime basis, thereby making collaboration and social interaction the real core function of this service.

However, Wave is still much more than that. The fact that the service is open source means that its potential applications are really limitless.

Provided someone takes the time to program an extension for it, Wave will allow for users to incorporate ANYTHING, and we do mean ANYTHING—even other websites, in your wave.

In many ways, Google Wave is a project with such myriad functions, that it’s very difficult to pin down and categorize. This sort of thing has never been done before and because of that, it defies explanation. Whereas most services will focus on performing one function extremely well, Wave seems to do everything communication-related at once and the end result is understandably tough put into words.

It is email, it is AIM, it is the wealth of information and entertainment that makes up the internet integrated into a single platform. It is everything and simultaneously nothing more than a blank canvas.

Wave was developed by a group of engineers who were essentially left to their own devices for months of development time and it shows in the resulting product. There’s no clear product, only amorphous potential.

Google has a real challenge ahead in marketing their new toy—and until they can figure out how to describe it in less than an hour and twenty minutes, the public will likely stay confused on the subject. Fortunately, WhirledInteractive has taken a step in the right direction, and released their own explanation of Wave. They aren’t the only ones. LifeHacker recently sent out a call for the best real life applications of Wave and hundreds responded with some of the most innovative things we’ve seen.

The Google team needs to take a page out of this book and present a marketing campaign that’s as creative as their product.

by: Robert Wang

Better thank your lucky stars. On October 5th, Adobe announced a workaround to the iPhone’s complete incompatibility to Flash. The company showcased a handful of apps, developed in Flash and directly converted to a fully functional iPhone compatible form, in front of a live audience at the annual Adobe Max event in San Francisco.

In enabling the channels of conversion, Adobe has opened the floodgates for ever greater volumes of 3rd party applications.

Now it’s anyone’s game—provided you can make it past Apple’s heavy-handed censors. By using Flash Pro CS5 (slated for public beta later this year), aspiring developers might finally get their very own piece of the much-sought-after Apple pie.

The iPhone/Flash incompatibility has long served as a source of annoyance for many a user: causing anything from minor style disruption to the total catastrophic failure of entire websites. Over the past decade, Flash has grown from amusing novelty to one of the primary mediums of content delivery on the internet.

Flash is used to power everything from animated ads, to video players (the likes of which have granted YouTube and Hulu their runaway success), to full on media platforms from which complex applications can be run—all on a lightweight, easy-to-install standalone program.

So why hasn’t Apple included Flash functionality on the iPhone? Due to the nature of the Flash player, it would, to be blunt, cut into Apple’s profits. Apple is currently maintaining something of a totalitarian regime over the software and hardware rights to its creations. Users can only gain additional content by purchasing it through the Apple regulated iTunes store…and Apple aims to keep it that way.

So will you ever be able to stream that new trailer off MovieFone? Don’t bank on it.

The Flash player actually violates the Apple Terms of Service, in fact any sort of plug-in to the Safari Browser would represent a breech in contract. But it’s a start, and with greater pressure to ease up on content restrictions arising from competition like the Google Android, it’s only a matter of time before Apple is forced to reconsider its policies.

However, with html 5 in full swing, the need for dynamic content plug-ins like Flash and SilverLight is significantly reduced—potentially to the point of obsolescence. Html 5’s design means that the potential and power behind web apps freshly created on its platform will be unparalleled: faster, more immersive, and ever closer to being indistinguishable from their offline brethren. To date, Apple, Google, Mozilla, and even Microsoft are doing their best to promote it.

With the lines already drawn, it’s going to be a tough, uphill battle for Adobe.

Is it time to ditch your Flash books in the closest dumpster and move on? Has Flash become so prevalent that it’s now an irreplaceable Internet staple? Look for Barefoot Solutions to weigh in on the debate soon.

In the meantime, let the games begin.

by: Robert Wang

Internet behemoth Google recently released an expansion to the Google toolbar, designed to give the online community the opportunity to submit unmoderated commentary in a collapsible side dock. Google calls its new creation the Sidewiki. It’s going to rock your world. Probably.

Users will be able to comment however they want, on whatever site they wish once they install the add-on. For example, a user wishing to leave his 2-cents on a CNN web article could simply type up his assessment, hit submit, and provided his comment met Google regulations, have his words immediately published. Similarly, comments can only be viewed if the add-on has been installed and the viewer is on a page where comments have been left.

While statistics show that the toolbar has been downloaded at least 2 million times from CNET alone, it is difficult to estimate just how many individuals actually know about, and moreover utilize the Sidewiki service provided by Google. However, if it ever reaches the mainstream—and there is a good chance of that, given the successful history of Google’s other product offerings—the potential for promotion, testimonials, and hidden goodies will probably prove too much for any good marketing business to ignore.

Ideally, this new add-on would grant individuals another medium through which it could provide invaluable third-party insight on hitherto unregulated e-businesses. Whether to sound the alarm on an attack page, to trumpet accolades to a well designed site, or give forum to a particularly thought provoking concept, the direction of the entire process would be determined by the masses.

And yet, therein lies the problem. The freedom it fosters will forever be its defining redemption, its potential for abuse will forever be it’s Achilles’ heel. It’s far too early in the game to tell whether or not the service will function as it was designed or become, like so many of its predecessors, a cesspool of virtual graffiti. (However, if the early, tentative test runs of the Side Wiki are any indication, the tone will be civil, constructive, and uncharacteristically reserved.)

Google claims that comments will be filtered and regulated in much the same way that search results are ranked for relevance. The more pertinent the topic, the higher it will be ranked by fellow users, thereby allowing it to float above the chaff, trash talk, and pointless spamming that tends to plague similar services. Irrespective, if you own a site, its probably a good idea to comment on your own page first so that you can set in motion a more positive precedent and block the potential hard-to-remove negativity spiral.

Understandably, a good number of businesses have already begun to raise protest at the thought of having the gateway to a torrential downpour of virtual anarchy unleashed upon their websites without permission. Never before has the public realm been granted such immediacy in its ability to deliver feedback. Users no longer need to navigate away from the page to read reviews, rather any evaluation, good or bad, is now literally a click away.

However, this isn’t to say this is a bad thing. People prefer to reference like-minded individuals before making a big decision–so in some senses the SideWiki is poised to become a sort of proxy for quality control like the BBB or veriSign Security button.

There’s potential for something great. Whether that manifests as another layer of detritus or as an invaluable tool hinges on how Google chooses to develop its brainchild. Fingers crossed.