Wordpress.com is all the rage, but Blogger has been around for quite a while and there are a few perks to using it. Here are a few I could come up with.

1. Editable Templates - No extra fee here, you can customize your Blogger templates to meet your needs.
2. Easier Widgets - This one comes from Anthony who feels that the ability to add widgets (or page elements) to Blogger is easier than over at Wordpress.
3. AdSense - Blogger makes adding ads quite easy. Before you know it, you’ll be making a quarter a day!
4. Video Upload - Currently in draft mode, but Blogger is going to allow direct video uploading into your post. The functionality is much like you already do for images. Sadly it doesn’t also publish to YouTube from what I can tell.
5. FeedBurner - FeedBurner functionality is built right in now that Google owns FeedBurner. More integration is probably coming too.
6. Publish via FTP - This is a big one, the ability to FTP your files to a directory on your own site is great. This means you can host your own blog, on your own site, regardless of your server setup.

Believe it or not, social media just may be what elects our next president into office. From Obama’s Girl to Giuliani’s Girl and now Hillary’s Girl, YouTube and other social media outlets will have a much larger impact on the younger voters than anything else.

Lets face it, watching a presidential debate is not high on many people’s list. It may have worked back in the day, but now more and more people are turning to the Internet for news and filtering out what they don’t want. Included in the filtering process will more than likely be campaign speeches, debates and candidates views. Instead, much of America will wait until someone spins it on MySpace, Facebook or YouTube before they really start paying attention. They won’t stop to fact check, they’ll just believe in it. That’s the way social media works though, if your friends say it’s true, it must be.

I’ve been searching and searching for a good way to get videos embedded into a Wordpress blog post and the best was was to turn off the WYSIWYG editor. Well not any more. Viper’s Video Quicktags could be the best plugin around.

What’s so great about Viper’s Video Quicktags? For starters it works with YouTube, Google Video, WMF, Quicktime and FLV files. But the kicker is it adds buttons to your WYSIWYG toolbar.

This is a big feature as I may know how other plugins work, but remembering, or telling someone else, is a bit harder. With Viper there is just an icon to click on and it tells you want kind of ID it needs. Simple and effective. Plus it’s a snap to install.

We are currently testing the Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin on a few blogs and so far it seems to meet the need.

How do you get your Flash files into a Wordpress blog post?

[tags]flash,quicktime,google,google-video,youtube[/tags]

One of the things that bugs me about Wordpress is this WYSIWYG editor. It’s nice, but it has a tendency to eat your code. However, I found out a few cool features.

Did you know that you can put in basic HTML code into the WYSIWYG editor and it’ll render out as HTML when you hit save or publish? You can put in bold, italic, span, link and image HTML tags all in the WYSIWYG editor. Have an image on Flickr you want to post? Put the entire raw code that Flickr gives you into the editor, and it’ll be converted into a pretty image when you post it. That’s quite handy when you don’t feel like toggling back and forth between the HTML window.

This does not work as nice though with services like YouTube that offer Flash elements. Embedding Flash is a bit more tricky. I’ve found it best to use Safari or a browser that doesn’t do the whole WYSIWYG thing. Then putting in the YouTube code works fine.