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Bloggers Feel in Jail and We Promise to Help Them Escape Eventually

Thanks Twitter (no matter how much time it is down
it still helps me track many interesting things people say about Profy) I have
just stumbled at a great post by Hank
Williams titled Disqus
And Profy – First Step To Totally Portable Blogging. And this pretty
humorous post made me realize one thing: with the existing blogging tools
bloggers often feel like they are in jail.

Why? It’s
simple: because the existing platforms do not allow bloggers actually handle
their content like their own. And Hank actually mentions Profy as one of the
two things that will help the bloggers get out of the jail.

So I wanted
to write the post here to actually confirm that yes, we are really planning to
help you do all the things related to your blogging activities in one place, no
matter what tools they currently use. The first step in this direction from us
is crossposting to other blogging platforms that I recently described in detail on
this blog. But in addition to enabling you publish from here to as many blogs
as you want to, we are definitely going to enable you to import all the content
from your existing blogs to Profy (and eventually export should you want to
move anywhere else, obviously).

Unfortunately,
we are unable to roll out everything we want so much to do right now so it will
take some time to implement. But the good part about Profy is that it is so new
that it depends on our bloggers where exactly we will take the platform. We are
building the platform for you so remember, we listen when you ask for something
– like in this particular case. We used to guess that some people may need such
functionality, but now we are sure – and we will make it real.

UPDATE: The post has just been published on Silicon Alley Insider so feel free to join the discussion there as well.

Profy Bloggers, Help Needed With Editing Wikipedia Entry on Profy

Over the
last week I’ve been trying hard to understand how exactly Wikipedia works in
terms of having an entry for your company there. What is absolutely clear from
the community guidelines is that you are not supposed to create or edit an
entry for yourself or your company. But it is obvious that by sitting and
waiting for someone to write a special entry about your entry you will hardly
ever get one!

So I
decided that I would publish a small post here inviting all the Profy bloggers
to participate in creating a page for
Profy on Wikipedia (this is the initial link that takes you to writing a
new page named “Profy”). After all, if you like the platform, chances are some
other people will be happy to discover Profy through one of the relevant
Wikipedia pages and more people will be blogging here. And we all know that
Profy is definitely more fun with more bloggers here.

So if you
feel like giving Profy some help on Wikipedia, feel free to use the materials
in our About page as sources. And
obviously, I will be happy to provide any additional information on the Profy platform
should you need any. I will appreciate any help from our users we could get for
Profy so thank you in advance!

Profy Tips: Using Your Profy Blog to Publish Posts to Blogger.com and LiveJournal

Today I’m
going to speak about a functionality of Profy that some of our users may not be
aware of since it is not really accentuated via your dashboard – the
crossposting. This functionality is useful for those bloggers that already have
a blog (or blogs) on Google’s Blogger.com
or Livejournal and do not want to
abandon those blogs only because they like Profy interface better.

The functionality
has already found a few fans and an example of successful implementation has
been given by Louis Gray on his
Blogger-powered blog. For many heavy bloggers this feature is very
appealing because it allows them to update their multiple blogs simultaneously
from the Profy platform – once all the blogs you want to update with the posts
written on Profy are linked to your Profy account, all the published posts are
sent to all those blogs you chose to crosspost to.

In this
post I am going to provide you a step-by-step guide on how to configure
crossposting from Profy to other accounts. And since we fully realize that this
is a pretty simplistic implementation of crossposting, I would like to invite
everyone to participate in a small poll in the end of the post so that we
realized what is needed the most by our users or leave your comments to the
post with your suggestions.

So, where
do you start once you decide to use crossposting from Profy to other blogging
platforms?

First, you
will need to go to the ‘Blog’ section of the platform and choose the tab
‘Settings’. In this tab you will find a pane called ‘Crossposting’:

To start
adding new blogs for crossposting, simply click the ‘Link to a new blog’
button:

This will
open a dialogue where you will have to choose the platform that you want to
send your posts to. Currently Profy only supports crossposting to Blogger.com
and LiveJournal but we will be adding more platforms in the future.

I will show
here the process of linking a Google’s Blogger blog to my Profy account below.
To start, you will need to choose Blogger from the list of platforms and this
will take you to the next step:

In this
step you will need to choose a title for your blog (this title does not affect
your Blogger blog – it is only intended for you to easily recognize the linked
blogs) and choose if you want Profy to crosspost to this linked blog by
checking in the “Enable crossposting to this blog” field. Remember, before you
are able to crosspost anything anywhere, you will need to authorize Profy to do
so by proving that these blogs are actually owned by you.

To
authorize your Profy account for crossposting, you will need to click the word
“here” in the “Click here to authorize your account”:

Don’t
forget that you will need to authorize Profy to Google in order to be able to
send your posts from Profy to Blogger (sorry it is in Russian, Google constantly refuses to apply my setting of English as my language to all their sites).

Once you authorize Profy, you will be
able to choose the blogs from your Google blogs that you want to crosspost from
Profy by checking their respective check boxes:

Once you
are done selecting the blogs you want to update from Profy, click Ok to
complete the process.

Now that
you have completed linking the blog (or blogs) from one of the blogging
platforms, you will have those linked blogs listed in the ‘Crossposting’ pane
of the ‘Settings’ tab:

For any
blog from the list you will always be able to disable crossposting if you want
to suspend publication of posts created by you on Profy or enable crossposting
again for disabled blogs. Or you can also delete the blogs you do not intend to
use in conjunction with Profy any more.

You are now
done, once everything is set up and crossposting is enabled, you will see your
new posts appear both on your other linked blogs as well.

And now the
small poll that I’ve mentioned in the beginning of this post. Your answers will
really help us understand where exactly we should take crossposting from here
on:

Poll Answers

Thank you for taking the poll and happy blogging!

All Around Profy: Photos, Videos, Presentation

I think
it’s about time that I add some flashy and beautiful content to this blog so I
thought I’d share some photos and videos with you here.

So first of
all a few photos from the Web 2.0 Expo where Profy was one of the sponsors and
had a nice booth that attracted lots of people.

First here
are the photos showing how we brought the booth to San Francisco: those two large suitcases
actually contain the entire booth and actually they did not meet any airlines regulations.
But somehow we managed to bring them to New York
from Moscow and then on to San Francisco. I think it was worth it!

When finally delivered
to San Francisco and installed,
the booth itself looked like this – very bright and green:

And this
photo was taken at the very end of the last conference day. (Left to right: Cyndy Aleo-Carreira,
our editor, and me.) We are very exhausted here but equally happy!

After all
the hassle with bringing the booth to San Francisco, we decided it would not be
very reasonable to carry them back home so no photos of the return trip with
the huge suitcases here.

If you want to see all the photos from the Web 2.0 Expo we made, here is the link to the entire set on Flickr.

I have also
spent quite some time yesterday choosing the best video hosting service to
upload Profy video demo. Of course, it is accessible at http://beta.profy.com/demo but I thought
I’d need to have it on some video sharing sites as well so here is the link to Profy demo on Vimeo and on YouTube as well. I’d love
it if you spent a moment of your time to choose this video as your favorite on
one of the services and help me spread the word – after all, Profy will be more
fun with more bloggers here.

And after
working on this, I must say that Vimeo is
definitely my favorite now, the quality is superb and they definitely do the
job the way it should be done. You can see that it actually works great by
viewing the embedded demo below:

Profy blogging platform demo from Svetlana Gladkova on Vimeo.

And
finally, yesterday I finally got to testing the new service called Docstoc that helps you share and embed
documents. I like the service itself and I like how it does the job in allowing
me to embed the Powerpoint presentation of the Profy platform to a blog post:

Profy-presentation – Get more documents

So that’s about it, I’ll try to share my further endeavors with videos and graphics on this blog in the future not to bore you with only plain text posts.

Comment posted by Ronald De Leon
at 5/9/2008 5:52:45 AM
Hope you had a good time! I can hardly imagine how tired you and your crew must have been transporting all of those things across the world!

Comment posted by Svetlana Gladkova
at 5/9/2008 2:52:51 AM
Definitely great time it was, it is an absolutely amazing event if you are involved in tech heavily.

But you are right – getting the booth there was unbelievably difficult. And by the time we started to load them into the rented car in SFO I could not believe we would ever actually make it! You know, carrying such huge and extra-heavy suitcases is against any and all aviation regulations. But our presence at the expo with the booth proves that all the regulations can be ignored even by those who are supposed to make sure they are observed

Web 2.0 Expo Results for Profy

Shame on me
for being so silent after we returned from the Web 2.0 Expo. In fact, such
events are really crazy when you have a booth there and hundreds of people stop
by the booth to see what this new name means and what we do at Profy. But no
matter how crazy it has been for us, we are very happy about the results and
the feedback from people – it feels great when you realize that people actually
like the platform from the very first seconds of watching the demo. So I want
to thank everyone who has stopped by our booth to say hi (I still have to send
all the follow-up emails) and to everyone who blogged about the Profy platform
and helped us spread the word.

So here are
the links to some of the blog posts covering Profy during and after the Web 2.0
Expo for those of you who want to read what other people think about Profy:

The new star of the web 2.0 blogging Louis Gray
published a
very detailed and thoughtful review of the platform here. I am especially
happy that he went as far as actually enabling crossposting from Profy to his
main blog (that is based on Blogger.com) and demonstrated how seamless it
really is.

Allen Stern from CenterNetworks continues to support
us with covering our development – he announced the
Profy beta in a new post of his here. I personally am very sorry about
missing Allen at the TechCrunch May 1^st meetup in NYC where I
arrived minutes after he left.

After the
conference was actually over, I had a chance to visit Josh Lowensohn from Webware in CNET office in San Francisco to show him the new features
added to Profy beta and this resulted in a great new post about
Profy here.

I was also
interviewed by David Knight and
he published
the interview here for anyone to be able to get more details on our future
plans for Profy. It is absolutely awesome to have such users as David who help
us spread the word about Profy.

I am still
waiting for some more articles to air after I was interviewed by prominent
bloggers and journalists in San
Francisco. I will update this post when further
publications arrive. And of course, I will be happy to list your thoughts on
Profy here as well if you publish them elsewhere – so go ahead and help us make
Profy big!

I also wanted
to mention that during the conference we met some excellent developers from
various startups and established web companies and agreed on prospective
integrations of their products with Profy. I think I’d better keep silent about
this for now as such integrations will be announced by us when actually implemented.
But believe me, the integrations we have in mind will make your Profy
experience even better and will add further exciting aspects to “All Things
Blogging” on Profy. 

Big Day – Profy Beta Launched Today!

Today is a
very big day for the entire Profy team as we are launching Profy beta at the Web 2.0 Expo
in San Francisco.
So first of all I would like to thank all our alpha users for their valuable
feedback and for helping us bring Profy to the next level. We know perfectly
well that we are not building Profy for ourselves – it is your blogging
platform and your opinion and your wishes matter the most here so we are still
looking forward to hearing from you to know where we should take Profy in its
further development.

You might
want to know what changes we have introduced today? So first of all we have
focused on improving and stabilizing the current functionality. We have fixed
all the bugs our alpha users helped us find and improved the platform’s
performance in general so it works faster and more reliably now.

And,
obviously, there are some new features added as well:

Crossposting:

You can now
use your Profy blog to manage your blogs even if they are not based on Profy –
we have made it possible for you to crosspost your Profy posts to your blogs on
Blogger and Livejournal. Sure enough, more platforms coming soon so stay tuned
as we are working hard to make Profy your real one-stop platform for blogging.

Tagging
people:

Even in
alpha you could use tags to identify posts in your own blog and in your feed
reader. Now we take tagging on Profy to the new level – you can tag your
friends on Profy to organize them and to make it easier for yourself to find
people when you want to contact them privately, for example.

Modifications
to the top panel on your blogs:

We have
modified a lot the top panel you see when you view your own blog or blogs by
other users. Now it is possible to report spam blogs or blogs with otherwise
inappropriate content. You can also login easier to your own dashboard using
this top panel and new users can create their own blogs when they like what they
find on your blog, for example.

Subscription
to blogs written by your friends:

We have
changed the process of subscribing to blogs created by your Profy friends – you
will now be able to choose if you actually want to read your friend’s blog.

Invitations:

While we
have significantly reduced waiting time for invitations approvals (in fact, we
have enabled them to be approved automatically unless the servers experience
the load they can’t cope with), we decided that we were not perfectly ready for
open registration yet (we simply did not want our current users to experience
downtime while the new bloggers arrive). But all the current and new users
receive 5 invitations to invite their friends to Profy by email so if you want
to share your Profy experience with your friends, feel free to do so now – your
friends will be let in immediately and they won’t have to wait for their
invites to be approved.

So again,
thank you for being with us from the very beginning, we will be looking forward
to hearing your feedback. Happy blogging

Comment posted by Svetlana Gladkova
at 5/6/2008 10:17:21 PM
Hi Michael,

First of all, thank you for being a Profy user, I appreciate your interest.

I will try to publish a post with the detailed instructions on posting
from Profy to Blogger and Livejournal  in the next few days (I’m still
trying to sort out  all the things after the conference).

In the meanwhile the hints briefly: when you link the account on Profy
with your Blogger blog, don’t forget to choose ‘Enable crossposting’
for this blog (you will need to authorize Profy to send posts to your 
Blogger.com blog first using the link in “Click here to authorize your account”). When the accounts are linked in this manner, when you publish any post to your Profy blog, it is sent to your Blogger blog as well.

If it does not work, do please let me know and I’ll try to figure out a reason since it could well be a bug somewhere. Thank you!

Comment posted by Michael Pekker
at 5/6/2008 8:49:31 PM
Dear Svetlana,

I am a new Profy user. Can you please give some hints how can I post from Profy to Blogger. I have connected my sites already, but could not find on the post interface a button or related link.

Thanks.

Press Release: Profy Announces Beta Launch of Its One-Stop Platform for All Things Blogging

San Francisco, CA, April 23, 2008 – At Web 2.0 Expo today, Profy is announcing the beta launch of its new Web platform for bloggers. Profy’s integrated solution supports a full range of advanced AJAX blogging applications to satisfy the most demanding and experienced bloggers yet features a simple user interface that novices will find immediately accessible.

The Profy platform underwent closed alpha testing in the first quarter of 2008. During this phase, it received positive reviews from prominent bloggers. Techcrunch’s Eric Schonfeld pronounced it a “social blogging platform” and “a natural evolution” of blogging. Profy has paid very close attention to the feedback from its alpha users and in the new beta version responds with performance improvements and important new functionality incorporating their suggestions.

Profy’s vision is to provide a single point of comprehensive seamless access and friendly navigation for the various stages of the blogging process – news reading, writing and publishing posts, discussing posts with readers, and otherwise communicating with readers and other bloggers. In short, Profy aims to provide – in one place – all the creative tools a blogger could want.

Profy’s platform is differentiated by its attention to the social aspects of blogging. It provides bloggers with tools to easily find people with common interests, communicate with them publicly and privately, and discover from them new sources of information. The combination of these features makes for a more “social” blogging experience, and virtually eliminates the possibility that bloggers will feel lonely because no one can find their creations easily.

Profy has chosen to announce its beta launch at the industry’s most influential event – Web 2.0 Expo, taking place in San Francisco at Moscone West April 22-25, 2008. To see first-hand how the Profy platform really differs from conventional blogging applications, visit the Profy team at Booth 940.

“We firmly believe that developers shouldn’t build web products for themselves but should build them for users,” says Profy CEO Ilya Korsun. “This is why we invite all bloggers to try out our platform, share their opinions with us, and tell us what functionality would really give them a better blogging experience. For our part, we will work hard to make the Profy platform the most blogger-friendly solution for all things blogging.”

About Profy, Inc.: Profy is a San Francisco-based company headed by Internet entrepreneur Ilya Korsun. The development team works out of Novosibirsk, Russia. The Profy platform has been in development since September 2006. The alpha version was launched in January 2008. For further information, visit http://www.profy.com.

###

MEDIA CONTACT:
Svetlana Gladkova
Vice President, Business Development, Profy
Phone:     +1 415 830 6309
Email:        s.gladkova@profy.com

We Are Getting Ready to Launch Profy Beta at the Web 2.0 Expo. Join Us There!

If you
follow the main Profy blog, you may have noticed that nice banner in the
sidebar announcing Profy participation in the Web 2.0 Expo that will take place
in San Francisco
on April 22-25. For us this is not some ordinary event – this is the first time
the Profy blogging platform will be publicly announced at a major industry
event.

This means
that we are also going to make a big announcement at the conference – Profy beta
will be launched with tons of improvements and interesting new features
suggested by our early alpha users.

To get
ready for the event and for the attention that we hope to receive for the new
Profy blogging platform there, we need to do some preparation in advance and it
involves reconfiguring our servers to support better performance of the
platform itself. Unfortunately, it also results in the necessity to take the
Profy alpha down on Thursday morning and keep it down until Profy beta is
officially launched.

So if you
are among our alpha users, I have to ask for your understanding of the fact
that the platform will be unavailable for the nearest couple of weeks. Sorry
for the inconvenience but I hope your patience will be compensated for when you
see what we are getting ready to launch. If you are new and want to be able to start
blogging on Profy when the platform is launched in beta, you will still be able
to request to be notified when we are ready to let you in. Remember, our major
principle is that it is the end user to decide what the ideal blogging process
should look like – so we will be happy to have you with us and to hear what you
have to say about how you want to blog.

And since I
started with the importance of the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco for
us, I would like to invite everyone to visit our team in our booth at the event
(booth 940, it should be easy to spot as it is located right near the Long Tail
Pavilion). So if you are planning to be at the Web 2.0 Expo and have a moment, stop
by to say hello as we will be very happy to see all our early users and Profy
readers there. If you are planning to participate at the event but have not
registered yet, you have a chance to pay less or even get to the expo floor
free of charge. If you register
using a special Profy code websf08co46, you will receive $100 discount off
any conference registration fee. Remember, if you only want to visit the expo
hall itself and do not plan to participate in the workshops and sessions, there
is a $100 expo pass – and this one you can get absolutely for free with Profy
using the same code. So here is another reason for you to visit the event – you
can actually get to the expo hall and meet numerous internet professionals
there absolutely for free! See you at the Web 2.0 Expo!

How to claim a Profy blog on Technorati?

Today I
realized that I have not claimed my authorship of this blog on Technorati yet. And since usually
Technorati is the first tool the majority of bloggers use to make their blogs
noticed by other bloggers, I have decided to correct this by claiming this
Profy blog.

Obviously,
I already have an account on Technorati that owns our multi-author Profy blog (I will appreciate you adding this blog to
your favorites, of course, if you like reading our posts). If you do not
have an account yet, you will have to register first.

After
signing in to Technorati if you want to claim a new blog (claiming a blog means
that you show and prove that you are the author of this blog), you will need to
go to your account. To do so, click the ‘Edit’ link located to the right from
your user name:

In the
account editing screen choose the ‘Blogs’ section. This section shows all the
blogs you already write and manage along with their properties (the blog
authority, the number of incoming links to these blogs, and the number of
people that added these blogs as their favorites).

In the end
of the list of your claimed blogs you will see a special ‘Claim a Blog’ pane
where you can initiate process of claiming your blog:

Type (or
paste) the URL of your Profy blog (in my case it is http://svetlana.profy.com) and click
‘Begin Claim’ button to initiate claiming process.

Doing so will
take you to the step 2 of the process: choosing the claim method. The only
option available for Profy blogs is “Post Claim”: it means that to claim your
blog you will need to write a new blog post on Profy and include a special link
to this post – this link will show Technorati that you are the owner of the
blog.

So after
you click “Use Post Claim”, you will be taken to step 3:

In this
step you will receive a special code generated by Technorati for its spiders to
identify this blog as yours. You will need to paste this code in a new post on
Profy in HTML mode:

Publish
this blog post. On your blog it will look like this:

After the
post is published (make you sure it is live on your blog using the “View blog”
button), you will need to return to the browser window where you have the step
3 of claiming process on Technorati and click “Release the Spiders!” button.
After this step is completed, Technorati will crawl your blog to find the code
it needs to verify that you are really the author of the blog being claimed.

And
finally, in the last step you will be given the opportunity to edit settings of
your blog on Technorati: add a 250 characters description, choose your blog’s
language, add tags to help people discover your blog (usually the more tags you
add, the easier it will be for people to find your blog).

Here you
will also be able to get the HTML code that you can use on your blog to invite
your readers to make your blog one of their Technorati favorites:

The procedure
to add one of the buttons to your Profy blog is as follows:

1. Copy the code for the button you like to the Clipboard.
2. Go to Profy -> Blog ->Layout.
3. Click ‘Add a page element’ link to add a new widget. Choose ‘Custom Code’ widget.

4. Type the title for the widget to help you recognize it.
5. Paste the HTML code for the Technorati button of your choice:

6. Click Ok.
7. Drag and drop the new widget in the Layout configuration tab to choose the place where you want it to appear.
8. Click ‘View blog’ to make sure the widget looks exactly like you want it to on your blog. Here you can see what it looks like on my blog placed between my tags and the widget displaying my Twitter updates. You can see it to the left from this text already.

So you are
done adding the widget to your blog.

Now that
you have completed all the steps and configured the blog settings on
Technorati, click ‘Save Blog Info’ to complete the process:

As soon as
Technorati crawlers complete their job, you will see your blog added to the
list of your claimed blogs with all the properties they have:

Now you can
delete the post you wrote to claim the blog – it will not be needed in the
future. I have decided to leave mine live on Profy as an example.

You will
always be able to edit Technorati settings for your blog, get code for a new
widget or even delete this blog from the list of your claimed blogs later
should you need to do so.

Happy
writing and growing your authority on Technorati!