Blogs are one of the hottest publishing tools around, but picking blog software can be rather  frustrating due to its great variety. There are too many blogging platforms and thus too many choices for the serious blogger to consider.That's why enterpriseblogs.info has been enriched with one more section devoted to blogging software. It contains the information about the most popular blogging software tools, and allows the readers to compare and choose the software they really need.

Forrester Research, known as an independent technology and market research company that has been providing pragmatic and forward-thinking advice about technology's impact on business and consumers for 22 years already, has carried out a research the results of which would be of great interest for many bloggers.

This time focusing on marketing trends, consumer search, social computing, a principal analyst on the Devices, Media, & Marketing Forrester team, Charlene Li examined the premium blogging software (Drupal, iUpload's Customer Conversation System, Roller, Six Apart's Movable Type and TypePad, Telligent Systems' Community Server, Traction Software's TeamPage, UserLand Software's Manila, and WordPress ) across 54 criteria. To further enhance the analysis,  client reference interviews with 30 user companies, including 3M, CNET Networks, General Motors, IBM, In-Q-Tel, McDonald's, Oracle, SAP, Time, Wells Fargo, and Ziff Davis Media has been conducted.

In the long run  iUpload was found to lead the market with its reliable blogging capabilities and its strong strategic vision of a blog as a lightweight content management system (CMS), a collaboration and knowledge management tool, and even as a foundation to form communities of customers.

When choosing between a full-featured suite like iUpload's Customer Conversation System or strong blogging-focused solutions like Movable Type and WordPress, companies should have a well-developed vision of how blogging will be used within the enterprise and then select a vendor that shares that vision.

Have you ever wondered how much time does blogging success require? May be, it isn't worth it at all?
A new study on blogging (PDF) by Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D. Chancellor Professor at the Center for Marketing Research at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, found that running a successful blog does take time. The study seems to be rather objective as it includes data compiled from interviews with 74 successful bloggers.
Interesting though, in one part of this study, two thirds of the bloggers report spending less than one hour a day on their blog, while 31% spend 1-3 hours a day.

In such a case, why in the second part of this very survey did the same successful bloggers who generally spend less than an hour or day on their blog list loss of time as their biggest complaint?

Now it is absolutely clear to me that the best way to become a computer whiz is writing tutorials...
When you have never used a piece of software before, or when clicking on “Help” is not answering your question(s), reading tutorials is a good way to answer some of your questions and help you get started. However, to get a complete understanding you'd better write tutorials yourself! Of course, at first it would be desirable if you asked someone to show you how it works and only after that start writing.  And be sure, as soon as you have finished your tutorial, the chances are that you will never forget about things you have learned.
Thus, now I can definitely state that I do know how to install Plone products using Quintagroup Plone hosting account after my having written a tutorial devoted to this topic although I have never done that before. The most important thing for me was that I was taking it as a game and was enthusiastic about putting all the screenshots needed for the Plone products installation tutorial together. After I finished with the order of screenshots, writing the text was rather easy and didn't take much time. 

The tutorial I was writing is now at the disposal of anyone who visits the site of Quintagroup. If there is something you would like to know about the whole Plone products installation procedure, you are welcome.

Yesterday was certainly a red-letter day for me, cause I managed to write my first tutorial.  I  used to think that such kind of tasks are somewhat boring and that it's impossible to get pleasure out of them.  I should admit to have been mistaken about that, 'cause it appeared to be fun in reality.     

The tutorial I was to write was ordered by one of Quintagroup's clients. He was using Plone Content Management System and wanted to cast light on the question of changing and setting different display views.  As it had to be my first tutorial, I decided to look through a couple of tutorials placed on the website of Quintagroup to have at least some general idea about it. After that I learned as much as possible about display views in Plone and started writing the tutorial under wise supervision of Ihor Berehulyak. 

The stage, on which I was doing screenshots, is especially memorable, cause having no Photoshop in Linux, I had to use its pretty cool analogue called the GIMP. It turned out to be a great graphical editor, if we forget about the moments when it totally refused to paste full screenshots. But I'm not ill-minded after all. Due to the Gimp I got all screenshots needed for my tutorial in one folder, and had them transported to NVU, an incredibly convenient visual html editor to use as it allows to switch between html source and preview mode. The text itself above the screenshots was not very difficult to write, although it's understandable that only after I write a few more tutorials I will be able to choose the right words quickly.

The tutorial I was writing is now placed on the website of Quintagroup. Probably, later it will be possible to have it on plone.org.

It seems to me the most difficult thing in writing this tutorial was to keep in mind that I shouldn't assume that “everyone already knows this”.

What I was happy to discover was the following truth:
You don't need to know everything to write a tutorial.  Just what is contained in it.

Some days ago we were sitting with Ihor Berehulyak and analysing the website sauti.co.uk based on Plone Content Management System . This site represents the company which provides cheap international calls, corporate telephony solutions, and a full range of Premium Rate Service applications for Media including Television, Radio, and Press. Our task was to get the general idea about this site and find out what keywords would be much- to-be-desired for the site optimization. So, it was a good chance for me to learn more about keyword research. After we've tried several keyword research tools, I decided to look for some theoretical material about things we did in order to check whether my assumptions were correct. Here is the information I was lucky to find out.

Keyword Research is a process of selecting the most “optimum performance” keyword phrases that can help visitors find your site. You may have spent days and months on fine-tuning your web pages for a better ranking with the major search engines, yet it will all amount to a big waste if the right keyword phrases are not targeted. Even if you achieve high search engine rankings, you may not get relevant traffic if you select the wrong keywords. Therefore, the foremost step in any SEO campaign is identifying your target audience and researching what keyword phrases they might be searching in the search engines to locate a site like yours.
A common pitfall is to start the website-optimization exercise with a set of “gut-feel” keyword phrases. Site owners often come up with ‘common sense looking' key phrases, which though look obvious, may not match with the ones your buyers are using as their search term. Facts are sacred in website optimization as they provide the exact data of what people are actually searching for, thus saving you from starting on a wild goose chase.

So, how does one get the facts and the data regarding a particular search term?

There are several online keyword research tools like Wordtracker, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and Overture, which offer data pertaining to your search term. Relying on these search tools to analyze keyword phrase data helps you get a grip on your target audience. By researching all these resources, instead of just one, you can determine which specific keyword phrases are the most popular on all these Web search engines and look for a common denominator. You can also see subtle differences among the engines. Some searches are more popular on one engine than another.

Wordtracker , for instance, is a fee-based service that offers a good search term database and makes searching for keyword related information easy.The database is constantly updated, with the oldest data being removed and replaced with the latest information every week. Although Wordtracker is a paid service for regular use, it offers the benefit of one-day free trial, which can be used to complete your keyword research if you are fairly organized. Competition Search can also be made at Wordtracker for your short-listed terms. Competition Search allows you to ascertain how many web pages exist for these search terms on different search engines.

Overture Search Term Suggestion tool, although intended to offer keyword popularity information to the PPC (Pay Per Click) advertisers, works fairly well to carry out your keyword research. Enter your main search terms and in response Overture lists out all other popular search terms that contain that particular term or phrase along with the popularity count. Overture lists the search terms in order of their popularity, giving numerical count of past one month. What's great, Overture searches not only Overture's database but WorkTracker also! It looks like the same tool but the results in the search term field is an anchor text that opens up a whole new set of data and word mining possibilities. In the new set of data it tells you how many times Google and Yahoo find this term on the internet, there is a list of related words which is linked to let you conduct a dictionary.com or thesaurus.reference.com search or to research on one of the related words. Very nice tool, and very useful for copywriters.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool offers some keyword recommendation tools, which can be used as a guide. Google Adwords Keyword Tool provides you with 2 lists of words. Specific keywords that are that include our keyword that have been searched on Google and Similar keywords that are relevant terms searched by uses that searched for your keyword also.

Keyword research is quite important for good search engine results, for findability, and it revolves around the question:

How do you know what words and phrases people use when they search for your product or service?

This is one area where the Internet is so cool, because prior to search engines and keyword research tools like Wordtracker, Overture, and Google Adwords Keyword Tool, you really never had a clue how people thought about your product or service. Do they think of "cellphone" or "cell phone", "mobile phone" or just "cell"? Knowing which is most popular, knowing which is sought more frequently on a search engine, helps you make sure that you're using the right phrases too.

I'm only standing on the long path of site promotion knowledge... Thousands of steps to be taken, millions of discoveries to be made... before I finally get to understand its basic things. Seems rather emphatic, right?

Yesterday, for instance, I got to know how important keyword search mechanisms are if you really want to make your site popular. Never before have I known that there could be so many nuances in keyword search. Well, probably it's not as complicated after all, but it's definitely not as simple as I thought. So I decided that it would be worth using the search engine of google and enter the phrase “keyword search” to get to know what “keyword search” means and how “keyword search” works.

So, what were the results of my keyword search for the the phrase “keyword search”?

The Spider's Apprentice explained to me the following.

Keyword search is the most common form of text search on the Web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords. Unless the author of the Web document specifies the keywords for her document, it's up to the search engine to determine them. Essentially, this means that search engines pull out and index words that appear to be significant. Since engines are software programs, not rational human beings, they work according to rules established by their creators for what words are usually important in a broad range of documents. The title of a page, for example, usually gives useful information about the subject of the page (if it doesn't, it should!). Words that are mentioned towards the beginning of a document (think of the "topic sentence" in a high school essay, where you lay out the subject you intend to discuss) are given more weight by most search engines. The same goes for words that are repeated several times throughout the document. Some search engines index every word on every page. Others index only part of the document. Full-text indexing systems generally pick up every word in the text except commonly occurring stop words such as "a," "an," "the," "is," "and," "or," and "www." Some of the search engines discriminate upper case from lower case; others store all words without reference to capitalization.

One more interesting thing. Keyword searches have a tough time distinguishing between words that are spelled the same way, but mean something different (i.e. hard cider, a hard stone, a hard exam, and the hard drive on your computer). This often results in hits that are completely irrelevant to your query. Some search engines also have trouble with so-called stemming -- i.e., if you enter the word "big," should they return a hit on the word, "bigger?" What about singular and plural words? What about verb tenses that differ from the word you entered by only an "s," or an "ed"?

Search engines also cannot return hits on keywords that mean the same, but are not actually entered in your query. A query on heart disease would not return a document that used the word "cardiac" instead of "heart."

Understandable, comprehensible, clear.

However, the main thing which should be remembered by anyone who is eager to promote their site is the following: design your webpages in such a way that the most relevant keywords are present in all the important locations and webpage elements. Keywords are really the keys to the site popularity.

Having become more or less familiar with Plone, I've learned the basic things about Plone products as well. At first I grasped that if you want to view all Plone products which are at your disposal, all you need to do is to get into the Site Setup and then into Add/Remove Products. After that you are free to select the product you want by pressing the install button. Vice versa, if there is some product you don't need, you can simply remove it with the help of the uninstall button.
In case the product you terribly need isn't in the list of your products, you''ll definitely have to go directly to plone.org  or Content Management Software Info and select it for download from the list of all registered plone products.

There was one more thing about Plone products I had to learn in Quintagroup. You see, offering a wide range of Plone services, Plone products development being one of them, Quintagroup really needs to keep a centralized database of useful add-on products for Plone. If you take a fresh look at it from the distance, you'll see that it's not really a piece of cake. With this never-ending flood of new releases of Plone products it's always hard to keep up. Now I know how to do it. And although it does take pretty much time, it proves to be worth it in the end. The problem which can arise from time to time is that not each Plone product developer gives enough information about their products. Sometimes you just have to guess not only under what license the product was released, but also somehow find out in what Plone versions it can be used. It may even be funny after all! Being a kind of a Plone detective...

  I just feel obliged to share my experience of working with Plone. It’s not normal that so many people have never heard about this content management system. It shouldn’t be this way, and I’m going to give you the clinching proves supporting this point of view.

When I came into Quintagroup office in the search for a job, I had not even the slightest idea about Plone and the opportunities it gives. Having been acquainted with this system, I’ve come to realise that even a non-professional can easily grasp the basic things about Plone as it is really user-friendly. And as far as I know, with every passing year Plone developers are making this system much simpler. If this tendency grows in a similar vein, in a couple of years every child would be able to use Plone. Being easily understood by people from widely different backgrounds and with very different skills, Plone provides a stable and useful platform for managing content and building web applications.

    Not long ago the mere thought about making my own site seemed absolutely unthinkable to me. It terrified me to death ‘cause I was sure it would take so much time and money! And only now it finally dawned on me that due to Plone miracles can happen. Not just because Plone is licensed under a common open-source license GPL, that allows anyone to use the source for free. What is amazing about Plone is that it breaks all imaginable bounds and limitations! And it does save time!

The reasons why I am making such conclusions are the following:

• Plone can be viewed in all kinds of browsers, which means that you can manage your intranet and public web site from a web browser anywhere in the world

• No specialised tools are needed for the web site updating, just a web browser.

• The main goal of Plone content management system is focusing on the information, but not on the irrelevant elements.
• An opportunity to assign other participants local roles within projects while editing and publishing content considerably facilitates collaboration

• The administration and configuration of Plone is done through the web, and no access to the file system is needed after the system is set up. This makes for a very secure system

• Plone has a centralized sign-on mechanism, which prevents users from having to log on to each area separately

• Plone lets the web design adjust flexibly to users with impaired eyesight and/or motor skills challenges
• Plone lets the users feel ownership towards the intranet, and encourages content production.

• A large active community supports development of additional add-ons and products based on Plone

    However, the list of Plone advanages given above is far from being complete and those are not the only things which make Plone so user-friendly. You’ll find it out as soon as you start working with Plone. It would be no exaggeration to state that you’ll love Plone with all your heart and soul and mind and being.

I’m happy that I have left my home for L’viv, ‘cause this city really keeps me starry-eyed and emotionally fulfilled. And although it was etxremely hard at first,  it turned out to be really worth in the end.  I finally found the job I was looking for. Now I’m working as a content manager for the Quintagroup company, which gives Content Management System Development Services to a wide range of clients.
  
As for my hobbies, I should admit that there some things I just can't live without. First of all, it's jazz, which I take not only as music, but as a state of mind and mode of life. I also adore watching and singing rock-operas (may be, some day I will create my own one, although I guess I'll be the only person to enjoy it). Photography, origami, swimming, hitch-hiking should also be included in the list of my likes.
That's probably it.

At some time in my past I perceived computers as something vulnerable and breakable, and so, having been a walking disaster, I decided to stay away from them for their own sake. They should have been grateful to me for my kindness, but in fact they were not. I discovered it later, when some force majeure circumstances made me deal with them. I had the impression they sensed my dislike for them, just like dogs do, and as soon as it happened they started to reciprocate this feeling. I have come to be aware of the fact that I was bound to be severely punished for my negative attitude to computers, and I have to confess that they had far more opportunities and functionalities for revenge than I for defense. They either appeared to have not enough memory, making me reboot them twelve times per hour or they refused to deal with the printer, driving me totally insane. Some of my friends knew that there was something wrong between me and computers. It all seemed extremely funny to them, and so they decided to play tricks on me using my PC. For instance, once they put a Scotch tape on my mouse roller so that it just wouldn’t work. I took it for granted as usual, and started surfing the net using only functional buttons. I must confess that it was a suicide. After that story my dislike for computers became even greater. To tell the truth, they nearly succeeded in trying to make me a psycho by persuading me that all my efforts were useless, but at some point in time I came up with an idea how to tame them. I started to demonstrate utter levels of patience and understanding to these artificial creatures, and they finally decided to forgive me. From that moment on we were trying to keep at least relative neutrality in our relationships, which was convenient for both sides.