On The Next Web

In a few words we'd like to communicate that we've had the pleasure to be interviewed by The Next Web Blog, within the "five questions for start-ups" series. The blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference that is held annually in Amsterdam. Many thanks to the editing team.

To access the interview, just click on the image below.

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Giants fall too. It just happens sometimes

For our service to be more reliable it's operated through Amazon Simple Storage Service. This aims to make the service available at any time and from anywhere, but unfortunately there happen outages with Amazon servers occasionally. It results in many web services, including BlogUpp!, not functioning. Such blackouts were noticed lately even with Google services, which tells that absolutely everyone is vulnerable. Obviously the problems get fixed shortly and the services become available again.

Herein we need to apologize to all our community bloggers for inconveniences and for them not being able to make use of BlogUpp! service during outages. The practice shows that Amazon servers might go down for at most several hours, during which we kindly ask everyone to be understanding. In this context we appreciate a lot all the reports that we receive from the community, that help us make sure where the issue is, and react promptly.

The good part is that Amazon is still one of the most reliable web players, with best uptime characteristics for their infrastructure. Hopefully it stays in the same position, and BlogUpp! will be available to you almost at any time, and almost from anywhere. Otherwise, we'll just have to change the partnership.

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Blog visibility, free. For sale too

In response to community's feedback, BlogUpp! now provides several ways to accumulate blog impressions, for more visibility and blog promotion. In addition to the main mode, when a blog gets promoted with each of its readers, there are available two more alternative ways.

The newly introduced update makes it possible to obtain additional blog visibility for a modest charge. Simply access your BlogUpp! stats page to find available 3 progressive impression packages, with attractive discounts. Currently they can be easily acquired through PayPal, although we are open to consider other methods that are convenient for the community, and we welcome feedback.

The above method is accessible for all the blogs accepted within the BlogUpp! community.
Besides, there is still available the possibility to obtain bonus impressions as part of our ongoing action. It only requires sharing with your blog readers your discovery of BlogUpp! service; just spread the word, and let us know about it. Please note however that we welcome only genuine posts, on blogs meeting community's criteria, such as: be with no adult, gambling and illegal content (e.g. warez and multimedia sharing), as well as to represent a real value for the community.

We'd like to emphasize that promoting blogs through the widget is free for everyone, and will always be. The newly added impressions acquisition feature is only to meet community's demand for alternative ways, as well as to allow us keep BlogUpp! running for you.

In closing, we'd like to quote one of Google principles, which we at BlogUpp! are following too:

Simplicity is powerful.
Simplicity fuels many elements of good design, including ease of use, speed, visual appeal, and accessibility. But simplicity starts with the design of a product's fundamental functions. Google doesn't set out to create feature-rich products; our best designs include only the features that people need to accomplish their goals. Ideally, even products that require large feature sets and complex visual designs appear to be simple as well as powerful.

// Image by DarylTanghe

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Get OpenID-fied and discover a new Web

Today we’re announcing that BlogUpp! is sharing its stats with you, the easy way. And as promised, you don't need to have yet another web account with us in order to access it.

With those tons of web sites requiring you to register so that you can use their services, it's not an easy task to remember all the user IDs and passwords. But things can get simpler, and we at BlogUpp! are constantly looking to implement technologies to ease and improve your whole web experience. And here comes OpenID. With it you can login to thousands of websites with a single digital identity, represented by a simple URL, which can be your homepage or blog, or it can be provided to you by a web site you use.

We now support OpenID too, and it helps you access your BlogUpp! stats just by entering your blog address. It's that simple. Before you start, we need to make sure your blog is OpenID-enabled. Actually most blogs hosted on Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, LiveJournal and alike have been OpenID-enabled automatically. Just click Stats from BlogUpp! main page, enter the address of your blog which uses BlogUpp! widget, and that's it. When you see your BlogUpp! stats it means you've been authenticated through your blog provider and you are ready to go.

For the other cases, including WordPress blogs on custom domains, there are simple solutions as well. Firstly, get an OpenID from sites like Technorati, AOL, myOpenID or others, which might already have your OpenID identifier, without you even knowing it. Then through OpenID delegation you can easily transform your blog URL into an OpenID. It only requires the ability to add a small snippet of HTML code to your blog.

For example, in case of myOpenID issued identifiers, the code to be added into the <head> of the blog would look like:
<link rel="openid.server"
  href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate"
  href="http://your_name.myopenid.com/" />,
which says that your blog is owned by the owner of "http://your_name.myopenid.com/" and "http://www.myopenid.com/server" may be used to verify the ownership of "http://your_name.myopenid.com/".

For an AOL OpenID, the code would look like:
<link rel="openid.server"
  href="https://api.screenname.aol.com/auth/openidServer" />
<link rel="openid.delegate"
  href="http://openid.aol.com/screenname" />

More examples of OpenID code snippets will be posted in the comments of this article, and we welcome you to share the OpenID snippet that worked for your blog. For more information about OpenID, visit OpenIDExplained.com or OpenID.net.

Get OpenID-fied and enjoy the difference with your universal online card and signature! From now on, you can enter dozens of sites, including BlogUpp! advanced module, simply by providing your blog's URL. Moreover, while being authenticated through your blog's URL as an OpenID, and commenting in the blogosphere, your blog is linked back automatically, with minimum effort. Isn't that cool? We think it really is. Enjoy it, and your blogging!

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We do no magic

BlogUpp! is not a service that deals with magic. You'll get no promises of tons of traffic, or thousands of instant visitors. It rather aims to be referred as a decent and fair support for every blogger who values readership and presents interesting content to the readers.

One of our priorities is to support you in building long-term readerships, without compromising your image in the eyes of such web players as Google. The visitors sent to your blog through BlogUpp! widget are your new readers; engaged ones. That's because they are not credit-chasers or affiliate program fellows to generate you simulated traffic. These are people who've got interested in your content shared in the widget, they appreciated your blog design, and they wanted to know you closer. They might not be as many as provided by multi-tier programs, which you need to constantly maintain. But they are the readers you are addressing; like-minded people.

The point we'd like to make is that BlogUpp! really encourages interesting content and creative presentation. We don't force readers to click and visit your blogs, rather provide everyone of you opportunities to deserve their attention, by sharing mini-copies of your blogs to larger audiences. Probably you use to share well your content yourself. But BlogUpp! is the easy way to do it, so that you can focus on blogging, of which everyone wins; both you and all the readers.

Additionally, please keep in mind that your inbound click through rates are dependent on how you favor outbound clicks in your widget. Expect moderate results if your widget is placed below the fold. And that's because BlogUpp! uses techniques to identify this, and promotes you on community blogs having similar widget placements.

We are in the Web 2.0 era, and we call you to make your blogs nice to surf, and interesting to read. The readers are the ones to reward you. Each visit to your blog gains for you through BlogUpp! views of your blog to other readers on other community blogs. Effortlessly of you. Just invest your time in things you like; create. Attractive content will always get readers from outside through the widget, and they will become your followers. For better results, just re-consider it, keep the content live and interesting, and people will come to join your readership. It's the easy way it should be; inartificially and organically.

// Image by Stuck in Customs

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Build the future. Make it good

We are proud to serve a community of influencers. People with deep thinking, who have a valuable say on what's happening in the society. It's you, the bloggers.

We all do realize very well that the children are the future, and the way we behave and treat them - determines who they'll become, and what the world will be. But sometimes it seems that this fact is being ignored.

Here's a video that we'd like to share and make the same call: "Children see. Children do. Make your influence positive".

We can do better. And we should.

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Respect your readers, and the bloggers

Summarizing in few words how BlogUpp! service works: each reader of your blog automatically triggers for it to be promoted, i.e. your blog's thumbnail and your latest article are shown in the widget to potential readers on other blogs. You just take care of your content, focus on blogging, and your readers will reward you for sharing your thoughts with them. Isn't that simple, natural and great, both for the reader and the blogger? We think this is how the Internet could become even a better place for all of us.

As you've probably noticed, we at BlogUpp! are not imposing conditions on using the widget. Particularly we don't tell you where to place it, but rather rely on common sense. Just think of the place on other blogs where you'd want a potential reader to see the window of your blog (this is one way how we refer to our widget). We think this way too when reviewing all the submitted blogs, and presume everyone is thinking the same. It's a matter of respect and ethics.

Beside the quality of the blog itself, the position you place the widget at is important for us. We give higher priority to those being fair with the community. On the other hand, those having the widget positioned too low, not having it visible completely or even hidden, and with poor content - are candidates for being rejected by us. We allow some time (a number of days) for the blogger to make the adjustments, and if that is not happening we are seriously considering the rejection. That is a measure to ensure the quality of our community of blogs, and we hope you all understand it.

Your should also know that we refer several levels of quality while considering the blogs for approval. Higher quality blogs get promoted on alike, while those with lower and not rejected by us get respectively promotion on similar quality blogs.

Even after approving a blog's submission, we do constantly track the behavior of the widget on it, and that could result in suspending or even rejecting it when appropriate. In the list of the new features to be provided by BlogUpp! is the possibility to rate up or rate down the blogs displayed in the widget. That will also support all of us have a community in which quality and mutual respect are valued.

You too can suggest features that would make the service better and at the same time keep it simple and light for everyone.

Wish all of you enjoy your blogging and discovering those new connections with BlogUpp! service.

// Image by LumaxArt

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RSS Awareness Day. Join to Gain

We at BlogUpp! are proud to sponsor the action named "RSS Awareness Day", initiated at DailyBlogTips.com.

RSS is a great and easy-to-use mean to keep yourself updated with fresh information, which is especially actual with today's volume of data. Same as getting an email on an update, RSS delivers new articles to you automatically, so that you don’t have to check your preferred sites and blogs manually. You can find an illustration of how it works at RSSDay.org.

Enabling RSS for your blog or site allows your readers to get notified whenever you have a new post for them. It also enables you, the author of the blog or site to share your thoughts more efficiently, and promote it; free. That's because BlogUpp! was designed as a blog promotion service, that reads the RSS regularly and shares posts and articles with other readers on other blogs.

We encourage all site and blog owners enable RSS and take advantage of the ease of staying in touch with the readers. Basically BlogUpp! welcomes any site or blog with enabled RSS, which meets our policy. Find out more on our main page, by pressing the "Wanna know how it works?..." link.

Three of our prizes will go to 3 bloggers participating in the action. More information on how easy it is to get involved can be found here.

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BlogUpp! is showing appreciation

We at BlogUpp! would like to thank everyone who is making use of the service. And most of all we'd like to express our respect towards the people who've helped the online community get to know BlogUpp! better.

BlogUpp! supports automated language filtering while sharing blogs within the community. In this context, we have to pay tribute for its multilanguage interface to those who've been so kind to make available the translation of BlogUpp! main page in many languages, as follows: Portuguese by Ricardo, Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional by Chada, German by Markus Dollinger, Japanese by Kirin, Spanish by Naty Strata, Italian by Tuttovolume, and Russian by Natalia Uzun.

Some of the community bloggers have posted about the service, and we'd like to mention the authors of some great articles on BlogUpp! in several languages, as follows: In English by RotorBlog, Eric Schweer, Attila Oláh, Jacob Morgan and Download-Agloco. In Chinese by Chada, Neolee, and Ironking. In German by Markus Dollinger, Italian by Tuttovolume and Jonica Blog. In Spanish by TensaiWeb, Radix and Juan. In Portuguese by Luiz Valerio and in Russian by Kondrat Martynov. In Finnish by Vaiheinen and Japanese by Kirin.

BlogUpp! is actually powered by real bloggers, and its value for the community gets bigger along with the number of the bloggers using it. The bigger the number of connections, the better experience everyone gets.

We are still looking forward to getting mentioned on such blogs as TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, and others. The authors of these blogs had been notified individually before service launch and repeatedly afterwards; we had tried following their submission recommendations and be kind when asking for their consideration, but unfortunately there wasn't even a reply to our requests.

The real "Thank You" is addressed to simple bloggers, who BlogUpp! is for, who keep sharing those quality blogs, and who are just enjoying blogging.
As still mentioned on our home page, everyone using the service and having a personal post about it (not copied), can get additional visibility; just let us know about that post, and we'll offer additional impressions to all those spreading the word about the benefits of BlogUpp! service.

Thank you all for enjoying it.

// Image by jcbonbon

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Comparing BlogUpp! & other services

BlogUpp! aims to keep things simple and easy, both for bloggers and readers to enjoy their online experience.
It is still understood that not all the advantages that BlogUpp! offers are obvious to everyone.

In this context there have been queries to make comparisons with other services that stand for blog promotion.

In order to make things straight and clear, we've prepared a simple analysis of BlogUpp! service along with other known ones, which is shown below:

	BlogUpp!	Entrecard	Spottt	BlogRush
• Membership-free, i.e. no signup	Yes	No	No	No
• Automatic widget generation, i.e. no ad submission	Yes	No	No	Yes
• Automatic categorization, i.e. based on RSS and context	Yes	No	No	No
• Interactive articles sharing	Yes	No	No	Yes
• Hassle-free, i.e. no multi-tier programs maintenance	Yes	No	No	Yes
• WordPress platform and alike friendly	Yes	No	Yes	No
• Targeted readers reach, i.e. no credit-chasers	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
• Multilanguage support	Yes	No	No	No
• Welcome bonus impressions for everyone	Yes	No	No	No
• Clicked widget doesn’t close the original blog	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
• No page load delay, i.e. no Java Scripts	Yes	No	Yes	No
• Cheat-proof and fair sharing *	Yes	No	No	No
• De facto exchange ratio **	10:9	N/A	10:5	10:2

* Repeated page refreshes won't change the blogs in the widget, to protect the community from impressions-waste;
** Total displayed blogs impressions versus yours.

Other misc advantages:
• SEO friendly link exchange, i.e. doesn't aim to alter one's PageRank;
• Although initially designed for bloggers, actually any website with enabled RSS can use the BlogUpp! service;
• BlogUpp! was designed on purpose to be unprecedentedly simple and easy-to-use, nevertheless it has a powerful engine, and it uses mighty techniques.

The conclusion - is your own. If you feel the above comparison is not objective enough, please feel free to comment, and we'll not hesitate to correct ourselves.
Or better, if you've discovered a different way how BlogUpp! does help you and your blog, we'll be pleased to include it in the list above.

Enjoy your blogging!

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BlogUpp! to speak your language

BlogUpp! seeks to be of use to every blogger with quality content, no matter the language and the location.
Your blogs are already being related by language, in the way that Italian blogs are shared on Italians, and Portuguese ones on Portugueses.
And BlogUpp! is committed to relate blogs by common interests soon.

Now we are initiating a new promotion, and we'll give additional impressions to bloggers who will contribute to the community.
You could get more impressions for your blog, by helping the fellows speaking your language (other than English) understand how BlogUpp! can do good to them.
All you need to do is translate the text from BlogUpp! home, and send it to us by email from the main page.
Before starting, we advise you to get in touch with us, and let us know which language you intend to interpret in; it might happen that we've got a translation already.

Please bear in mind that translations done using automated translators will not be considered. And please note that we are able to reward provided you have a quality blog yourself, and use BlogUpp! service.

We thank you in advance for cooperation and look forward to hearing from you.

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WordPress blogs submission

We at BlogUpp! strive for simplicity and efficiency for the community. However, there are few limits that can't be bypassed.

In case of WordPress weblog platform, to enable BlogUpp! assist readers in promoting the blog, it's not enough inserting just one piece of code. It requires having two codes, one of which should be entered in the CSS (style sheet), and the other one in a text widget of the blog. That's the only way how BlogUpp! can do the rest of the work.

At http://www.blogupp.com there are detected automatically blogs hosted on WordPress, and are provided those two codes ready for use, along with the directions. Below is an example of how a WordPress blog submission is treated:



Nevertheless, there are bloggers who've used only one part of the code, and that is not enabling BlogUpp! service on their blog. As long as BlogUpp! piece is not visible, it means those two steps weren't both completed.

As soon as that restriction is canceled by WordPress, BlogUpp! won't hesitate to ease the submission, same as for other platforms.

Wish you great blogging!

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RSS related directions

Some of the bloggers have got in touch with us concerning BlogUpp! not recognizing their blog's RSS. Thanks for the feedback.
That was mostly due to the fact that the blogs weren't linked properly to the RSS feeds.

Normally, blog platforms automatically include in the header of blogs the <meta> tag referring the feeds. However, still there are blogs that don't have it.
In that case readers can't subscribe to keeping updated on your posting, neither BlogUpp! could share your articles.

In order to sort that out, for those that are to face this issue, please consider including the following line in the <header> of blog's html:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS TITLE" href="http://www.blog_address.com/rss_file_name.xml" />
changing in it title and href attributes to the actual ones.

A simple way to check whether it was done correctly, is just to open you weblog in your web browser, and see if the RSS icon is enabled, meaning that it has detected your feeds.

Additional information on what RSS is, can be also found at RSSDay.org

Best web wishes to all of you!

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Hello! Ciao! Bonjour!

Hello! Ciao! Bonjour!...

Thanks everyone for joining the BlogUpp! trend.
We are very pleased that so many people from all over the world are benefiting from this service.
BlogUpp! is constantly getting tuned so that you reap the best out of the service.

You've probably noticed already that BlogUpp! is sharing blogs in your language as well. For instance, a BlogUpp! widget on a Spanish blog shows blogs in Spanish and English. Should you eventually note unexpected language blogs in your widget, drop us a line, and will teach BlogUpp! to be more accurate.

Forget of maintaining link and banner exchange programs.
BlogUpp! does it all automatically.
Just enjoy your blogging!

//Photo by PhotoGraham

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BlogUpp! launch press-release

Dear Blogger,

We are happy to share with you the news of BlogUpp! public launch. Please check below the press-release related to the roll out of the service that we are proud to present to you.

BlogUpp! - the easiest way to get readers and traffic for quality blogs

BlogUpp! introduces an improved service aimed to drive traffic and discover new connections for bloggers with quality content, the easiest and more efficiently. It has the best of any link exchange or banner exchange service, and more. BlogUpp! operates with the highest in the industry exchange ratio of 10:9. There is no signup, no account, and no other data required, except the link to the blog. BlogUpp! generates in return a short code, for the blogger just to copy and paste into its blog once, and which will result in driving traffic to it for good. WordPress platform and alike are supported as well.

BlogUpp! doesn't require the blogger to submit an ad either, as it automatically takes a snapshot of the blog, and shares it on others using the service from http://www.blogupp.com. Each blog's snapshot is accompanied by the most recent article, which BlogUpp! gets by reading blog's RSS regularly. In this way the blogger enriches its blog content, and the readers are provided with diversified and interactive information. At the same time this method ensures there are no animation and annoying ads displayed to the readers.

As the community of blogs with BlogUpp! service gets bigger, the bloggers will get interconnected through common interests. BlogUpp's method for scanning the content of blogs and its smart technique will enable interaction between bloggers with similar topics and quality content, without requiring a weblog category being specified.

Although every blogger is invited to benefit from BlogUpp! service, each submitted blog passes an approval step, in order to ensure only those with quality content are added. There are not accepted adult, gambling, and illegal or inappropriate content websites, which aims to make BlogUpp! a family friendly service with quality content. The approval doesn't require additional action from the blogger though. As indicator of the approval status is the color of a specific element in the banner.

Every approved blog gets bonus impressions from the start. BlogUpp! has a democratic method of displaying impressions, so that even blogs with very few readers get fair visibility on other blogs. The more blogs one shows, the bigger the number of credit impressions it gets. However that doesn't have to encourage cheating, aimed to artificially increasing the number of blog views by constantly refreshing it. BlogUpp! handles such attempts appropriately, so that to value blog's readers, and not displayed impressions as such.

Even though no account is required with BlogUpp!, that doesn’t mean the bloggers can't benefit from monitoring their stats. Those willing to use this feature will get it just by following-up an easy procedure. Advanced bloggers could also use stats analytic services that are already available with their weblogs. BlogUpp! seeks to be referred as a simple, efficient and honest community service.

The reliability and scalability of BlogUpp! are supported by Amazon services, which aims to maximize the availability and efficiency of the service for anyone, and at any time.

Previously used methods for adding visibility to a blog consisted mostly in building textual static blogrolls. That implies firstly getting to know of a weblog and only after that a link is to be established manually, by crawling the HTML for each update. With BlogUpp! the bloggers have the possibility to discover new connections effortlessly, in an interactive, automated and extremely simplified way.

With a one-time inserted code into the weblog, the blogger gets to be known by other fellows who share common interests, obtains a boost in the traffic, along with a vivid, fluent and evolved blogroll. In this particular manner each blogger increases its chances for the blog to be shown to a wider audience, with no complexity at all.

All the bloggers are invited to take advantage of BlogUpp! service, which makes it easier than ever getting the bloggers interconnected. Readers and traffic are the true currency for the weblogs, and BlogUpp! can give it cost free to every blogger with quality content.

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