MickMel SEO

Anil Dash has a unique idea (via Steve Rubel), though I’m not sure if it’ll take off or not — embedded blog posts.

Anil figures that if people are always embeddeding photos and videos, why not let them embed the text of blog posts too?  It seems like it might be a good idea.

The main problem I see is this:

• A lot of bloggers prefer to link and comment about other posts (like I do) and wouldn’t want to embed the full post.
• A lot of other bloggers have a hard time embedding code due to WYSIWYG editors and their lack of HTML knowledge.

There’s still a lot of bloggers left in the middle, so this idea still might find a big audience.  Even if it doesn’t end up becoming popular, you’ve gotta give Anil some credit for a very creative idea.

Another potential problem stems from the fact that the blog content you embed is still live.  If the author updates it on their end, it automatically updates on your site.  For many things, that’d be great!  However, if the author decides to put up a XXX image instead, you’ve got problems.

As a blogger, is this something you could see yourself using — either offering embedded code of your posts, or embedding other posts in your site?

Google Reader is the primary source of information for most of my blogs.  I track nearly 400 blogs in Reader, which help supply links and content for my various sites and also allow me to keep up with my own sites.

A while back, Google Reader added a “Discover >>” link to their site, which provides recommendations to add to your reading list.  I didn’t use it much for a while, but now it’s become a daily stop for me.

The recommendations page lists about 15 blogs that it thinks you might like, based on your current reading habits.  Each blog shows the number of current subscribers (in Google Reader and iGoogle only), the title, a short blurb and the average number of posts/week.

At first I was disappointed that I couldn’t view more than a single page of recommendations, but I’ve developed a nice workaround.  Each day, I pull up the recommendations to see what’s in there (see the image on the left).   Then I simply deal with all of them.  If a blog sounds useful to one of my niches, I’ll subscribe.  If not, I’ll click the “no thanks” link to make it go away.  Once the list is empty, it’ll stay empty for the rest of the day.  The next morning, though, it’s back with new items!

The thing I need to get better about is cleaning out blogs that don’t post information that is useful to me.  I do my best to unsubscribe, but I’m usually trying to dig through a lot of items so I just plan to “get back to it later”.

If I see an item that is blog-worthy, I either blog about it right then (if it’s time sensitive) or give it a star.  When things cool down in the evenings, I pull up my starred items list and work through it.  As I blog about each item, I remove the star and it goes away.

Any other tips for dealing with a large number of feeds?