When Sprout Builder was first released in beta, this drag and drop Flash authoring widget building environment was immediately on fire. Although there was not much wrong with the original Sprout Builder, they have recently released a much more sophisticated version of their flash building services today. The new Software Development Kit in conjunction with authoring controls have seen a large amount of improvement, offering an excellent taste of the kind of extended functionality that users are now going to be able to take advantage of.

One of the new additions to the Sprout Builder service and its Software Development Kit includes full integration with Brightcove, Twitter, Seesmic and numerous other web services directly into the widgets that users create. The Software Development Kit or SDK has been slowly opening up to add additional support for as many services and developers could possibly imagine. There are also numerous additional authoring controls that are definitely worth noting the appearance of:

If you tried Sprout Builder in the past then you probably noticed that its first official launch had a few small kinks, but new improvements have cast these kinks out and turned Sprout Builder’s authoring controls into a much more fluid system.

- Page History –

Each and every page in the authoring space for a Sprout widget displays the last twenty editing actions that you took there, meaning that you can revert back, so taking bigger risks is possible without fear.

- Effects –

Elements can easily be set to flash at hover, to slide in at the loading of a page, or to perform a wide variety of other interesting effects. This is a simple enough matter that allows for authors of widgets to add some truly helpful finesse to the widgets that they create.

- Text Control –

Displaying RSS feeds has become one of the handiest possible ways to turn Sprouts into dynamic widgets. The text output in previous incarnations of the Sprouts utility was ugly and incapable of being changed but this is no longer the case. Now Sprout is a great deal more usable in terms of being a production level utility.

The launch of the Sprout Builder SDK platform has brought on a lot of extra potential. The SDK tool already packs a giant punch in terms of potential and productivity. By opening it up to outside developers, Sprout Builder is allowing outside developers to come in and greatly amplify the impact of the utility for added benefits.

The capabilities of the Software Developer Kit are growing increasingly sophisticated as time goes by, offering additional integration support at a rather consistent pace. All kinds of additional integrations will be offered in the coming months, including Seesmic integration that can handle recording videos straight to Seesmic from a Sprout rather than simply viewing videos, and Ribbit Click to Call which couldn’t be easier to utilize and has recently been taken live.

Photo Credit: 1

Originally posted 2009-01-12 05:52:09. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

• Top Five Reasons Corporate Blogs Are Vital As more companies get into the world of corporate blogging, the word is spreading that this is a great way to reach out to the public. There are five specific benefits that any company can reap as a result of setting up a corporate blog. 1. Cheap means of marketing.......
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This is part three in a series about tips for good corporate blogging. We touched on three tips in both the first part and the second part of this series – Now here are another handful of tips for your consideration.

- 7 – Write clearly and concisely when it comes to everything that you publish in your blog.

You should be aiming to craft short and to-the-point questions. You should only be touching on one single concept per sentence in order to keep the attention of your readers. Avoid writing using double speak or technical terms and jargon that may persuade your readers not to stay. Your sentences should be simple and straight forward, rather than forcing your readers to think hard about the meaning that you are trying to get at. Use specific punctuation marks, including dashes and commas, as liberally as you possibly can. In some ways, it may be ideal to spoon feed your content to your readers to make sure that no part of the meaning is lost, and that your readers come away feeling confident about what they have read.

- 8 – Use keywords as often as you possibly can when writing in your blog post, but only where they feel natural.

Using relevant keywords often when writing your blog posts will help you stay on purpose, and they will also appeal to the search engines. Your search engine rankings will go up, and you will likely enjoy more traffic as a result. This is one of the reasons why your blog should have a solid purpose statement before you begin to write in it. The more clearly that you are able to convey the purpose behind your blog, the more consistently you will be able to deliver messages that are on task and on target with the niche or industry that you are attempting to sell. The more often your preferred keywords show up, the more likely you will be to garner improvements in search engine ranking and results.

- 9 – Write conversationally when you write in your blog.

Rather than writing with a formal edge to your writing, you should be writing as if you are speaking to an old friend. Your blog should be friendly and conversational, but only as long as you’re still providing information and value in each of the blog posts that you create. There is nothing wrong with implementing common expressions from speech in your blog posts. For example, you can use terms like these:

“Hey guys”,

“Go Figure!”,

“Now I’m asking you”,

“Gotta love it!”

“What’s up?”

You should also keep the age of your average reader in mind when determining the “voice” of your blog entries. Ending each blog post with “TTYL” for “Talk To You Later” may not go over as well for certain audiences as for others. Just keep in mind that the rules for conversation in a blog are not the same as writing content for other purposes, as things are much more casual and conversational when writing and communicating in a blog.

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Originally posted 2009-03-02 05:36:43. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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One of the biggest problems facing corporate bloggers is finding an audience. If you’re using your blog as a way to promote your company’s products, it is vital to quickly build up a strong readership. This is not an easy task, and even though paid promotion can be helpful, there are some better methods that can be used to get real results. Blog networks may be the answer to your problems.

If you’re not familiar with how blog networks work, it is similar in a way to the webrings of yore, but with some key improvements. A blog network will usually cover a set variety of topics within a certain industry. For example, there are blog networks for golfing, books, news, and many other topics. Readers that visit the blog network are given an opportunity to discover blogs that cover information they are already interested in.

A blog network will usually have a main page that will list all of the newly posted blogs that are members of the network. In addition, they may even promote select blogs that are doing well and feature them heavily on their main page. B5 Media is a great example of a massive blogging network that has had tremendous success. They now feature blogs in practically every industry and niche under the sun and continue to add more on a weekly basis.

Now that you understand what a blog network does, how can you begin to take advantage of that? First, you will need to identify your specific topic niche. This can be something that your company does, sells, or something that is pertinent in any way to your company. For example, let’s say that you run a site that sells golf clubs. You should look for a golfing blog network.

After you have found the blog network that is right for you, it’s time to get serious about posting. You may need to modify the approach of your blog for the network to make sure that you will be successful. Bloggers that incessantly promote their stores, or fail to craft interesting posts usually don’t do well. Instead of focusing solely on your company in your blog, you may need to start writing posts that provide information readers can really use.

To illustrate this, let’s return to our example of a golf club store. The corporate blogger for this store could begin writing posts that deal with golf swing tips. A subtle promotion link could be added to the store within the post, but the main focus of the blog post would be on an actual tip. This type of post usually does very well on a blog network and you can see remarkable results.

If you’re ready to get serious about promoting your blog, seek out a blog network that caters to your niche and sign up. Chances are, you’ll be able to increase your readership very quickly and your site will see the benefits right away.

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Originally posted 2008-09-11 05:27:23. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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