Are you using SezWho on your blog?

July 31, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 22 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Communities, Social Networking, WordPress 

This morning, while registering this blog with BlogCatalog, I discovered something new called SezWho. It looked interesting, so I did a little more research and decided to implement it on 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

What is SezWho?

From their FAQs page:


SezWho is a universal profile service that engages your community and enables content discovery. SezWho is all about making the Social Web truly social.

SezWho enables content rating, universal user profiles, and reputation-based content discovery to be added to any social media site. The SezWho service works with blogs, forums, wikis, video/picture sharing sites, discussion boards and anywhere else where people contribute content and engage in conversations.
SezWho is focused on delivering benefits to all participants in social media interactions:

* Readers can easily distinguish credible content and commentary, and they can follow contributors as they participate on social media sites across the web

* Contributors gain web-wide recognition for their insights and expertise, with a universal profile that accumulates a record of all their contributions, across all communities

* Site-Owners and Publishers can spotlight and leverage informative, high-quality content to engage their communities and drive traffic

Since this blog is powered by WordPress 2.6 and uses a widget-enabled theme, installing SezWho was easy and quick.

After downloading the plug-in from a link on BlogCatalog, it was just a matter of uploading it to my server, activating the plugin, adding the key for the API, and setting some preferences. Since I went with the default settings, it took no time at all once the plugin was uploaded.

I experimented with adding the two widgets and finally settled (for now) on showing both the Red Carpet (people who have left comments) and the Badge (information about me) in the left column.

Now, when you visit the 21st Century Affiliate Marketing blog, you are able to rate each post I write. I invite and encourage you to do so. I appreciate the feedback.

Also, whenever anyone leaves a comment, other readers can rank the quality of the comment.

(You are not allowed to rate your own posts or comments, of course.)

I’m hoping this will encourage more high quality comments as I blog more frequently. It has taken some time to get this blog configured as I wanted, so now I get to write more. I hope you’ll feel free to rate any posts and comments, and to leave comments of your own.

Together, we can learn more about affiliate marketing in the 21st century and when you leave a comment, you’ll get a link back to your site and a link to the comments and posts you’ve made elsewhere, based on information SezWho has gathered across the web.

For example, if you look at the comments to a post, each commentor will have their name listed with a link to their site (if they entered it when making the comment). Following that is a link that says “Who am I?” If you hover your mouse pointer over that text, or click it, you’ll learn more about that person’s postings and comments across multiple blogs.

I think that’s going to be useful – at least, to me – because I like to learn from people who are well-informed.

I don’t know for sure, since SezWho has been installed for only a few hours on this blog, but I think I’ll find it interesting and helpful.

If you want to add SezWho to your blog, just log in to BlogCatalog.com and click the Manage Blogs link. If you have multiple blogs listed, click on the Manage link to the right of the Blog’s name.

That opens a new page where you’ll see a link to SezWho just to the right of the Edit Your Blog heading.

Follow the directions in that section to register for SezWho and to get the plugin. I can’t guarantee it will be as easy for you to install as it was for me, because I held my mouth just right, bit the tip of my tongue, and all the stars were aligned just right when I went through the process. (grin)

Will SezWho make a difference with how you interact when you visit this blog? I don’t know. I hope it encourages more interaction.

What do you think? I hope you’ll comment on this and see how it works for you, too.

Act on your dream!

JD

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