Do you want your blog to get found? Are you looking to drive new, loyal readers to it? Do you want to expand your thought leadership? Are you tired of your tweeted links evaporating? Do you want to create conversation around your content?

Whether you’re blogging for yourself or your business, Pinyadda’s platform allows you to connect your content with the people interested in it and create community around it. Here are the top 5 reasons you and your blog should be on Pinyadda:

Reach new readers

When you publish a post on your blog, Pinyadda places it into topic-based feeds. People choose to follow these topic feeds so if, for example, your post covers mobile and social media, anyone following those topics will see the post in their feeds. Many people discover new sites from posts they read in their topic feeds and in turn follow that site. While the average online news reader visits 2-4 sites regularly, the average Pinyadda member follows 12-16 sites!

Users also discover new sites by visiting the Newsstand on Pinyadda, an interactive way to connect people with the content, sites, and people who match their interests. For example, users can find recommended sites related to a particular topic. The Newsstand is also the first place new users are dropped when they register for Pinyadda, so it is one of the most frequented visited pages by the community.

Curate your posts

You actively curate your content within the Pinyadda community by sharing it (we call this pinning), perhaps asking a specific question about the content or summarizing what it is about. When you pin an article, everyone following you on Pinyadda will see that you shared it (similar to a tweet on Twitter) and they can then pin and discuss the article too, passing it along to their friends and followers. These pins also hit a community feed that people visit to discover what’s currently being pinned and discussed on Pinyadda.

Reward your top readers

People who pin and discuss your blog posts regularly can become the Ambassador of your site. This is part of what we call value mechanics on Pinyadda, automatically rewarding your top users, and allowing them to boast the status on their profiles. Knowing your Ambassadors also allows you to get to what other content they follow and the people who follow them.

Establish influence

Another part of Pinyadda’s value mechanics are topic Mavens. You become the Maven of a topic that your blog covers by pinning and discussing news and blog posts related to it. Mavens and Ambassadors are featured heavily in the Pinyadda community – from feed pages and the Pinyadda Newsstand to our weekly newsletter and blog posts where we promote all the top people and influencers on Pinyadda. Being featured in this way means more people will follow you on Pinyadda and find your blog’s content.

Create community

As you begin to pin and discuss your posts as well as other articles, you will begin to create community around your content. Regardless of whether you are discussing your own blog posts, other content on the same topic your blog covers or general news, this activity on Pinyadda is inbound marketing for your blog. Once people feel that they have a connection with you and see you as a real person, they’ll be much more likely to help evangelize your content and come back for more. As any social media pro will tell you, it’s all about conversation!

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How do you use Pinyadda with your blog? Let us know in the comments!

1. The Article Tag – The  article tag (<article> ) and its corresponding child tag ‘section’ are intended to help standardize the way we present blog-style content all over the web. The basic blog layout we’re all familiar with has been incorporated directly into the standard with HTML5, making it easier for developers to quickly create flexible layouts that are more machine-readable than ever. What does that mean? It means that every blog in the world now has a standard unit of content that’s easily found by search engines, crawlers, and other automated technology, opening up the door for a new wave of innovative applications that make news distribution and consumption more palatable to the digital cadre.
2. Native Audio and Video – HTML5 comes standard with support for audio and video elements that are run without the help of third-party plugins like Quicktime and Flash. While the debate rages on about who’s cooler in the world of multimedia rendering, there’s no doubt that HTML5 is the most open and universal way to display video and audio content. While it may not seem like a big deal, this increases parity in the publishing world by allowing the little guys to implement audio and video content quickly, easily, and at no cost. From a larger perspective, the inclusion of these elements essentially marks the end an era – the web is no longer a cloud-based version of our static print world, but an entirely new medium that obfuscates the boundaries between different forms of media. If that’s not disruptive, I’m not sure what is.
3. Geolocation – Those who follow the news industry know that the trend toward embracing local and hyper-local coverage is in full swing. HTML5′s sophisticated geo-location capabilities make implementing local features significantly easier and promise to provide accuracy that far exceeds the traditional IP-address tracking methods in common usage today. I expect to see support for geolocation features emerge as a central tenet of popular blogging platforms like WordPress in the next year or so and am excited to see what developers create in the form of plugins and patches to take advantage of its support. Connected people’s internet worlds with their physical surroundings is a powerful concept and one that (I hope) could have meaningful effect on revenue generation for small to mid-size publishers.
4. Mobile – This is a big one. Together with CSS3, HTML5 provides a powerful feature set for creating flexible layouts that scale appropriately depending on the size of the screen they’re viewed on and degrade gracefully when confronted with a less-than-ideal device (read Ethan Marcotte’s great article for more here). As mobile devices continue to evolve (think tablets and e-readers here, as well as phones) and the shift toward consumption on those devices continues, this means one very powerful concept may soon be a reality: a single site for all devices, without compromise on user experience. While it’s hard to imagine Microsoft won’t somehow throw a wrench in the process, that reality could well be one of the most important things that’s every happened to content on the web. After all, our internet isn’t truly mobile until we can take it anywhere and know what to expect.

There’s plenty more that can be said for HTML5 and I encourage anyone interested to check out some of the resources listed below. In the meantime, be sure to follow the Web Design topic on Pinyadda to keep up with the latest in HTML5 news, resources, and tutorials. Leave more in comments and let me know what you think about HTML5 and the news industry.

Some killer HTML5 links:

• A Brief History of Markup – A List Apart, May 2010
• Dive into HTML5 – Mark Pilgrim
• WC3 HTML5 Specification
• 23 Essential HTML5 Resources – Ryan Carson for Carsonified
• VIDEO: How HTML5 is Going to Completely Change your Web App – from Molly Holzschlag

As the web has evolved, and we have evolved with it, we have started to see that “one size fits all” doesn’t apply to graphing our personal connections online, and more particularly it does not apply when hosting different types of user behaviors.  This is why we manage and engage with our business connections on Linkedin and not typically on Facebook, to give one example.   Considering that social media is still a very young medium, it is safe to expect that more platforms will emerge hosting different connection types and user behaviors.

In the past several years, the Internet has turned the news and greater media industry on its head – everything from content creation to distribution has completely changed.  This has created problems for both consumers and publishers.  For consumers, discovering and accessing the news that is most valuable to us has become overwhelming.  For publishers, developing a strong community and converting that community into hard dollars has become incredibly difficult.   At Pinyadda, we have designed our platform specifically focusing on the evolved news and media landscape, hosting what we call the “news graph“.

The individual parts of the news graph have existed for a long time (post about this coming soon).  With Pinyadda, we are focused on connecting these critical parts and providing more value to the different entities within the news ecosystem.  We have studied how our behavior as news consumers has changed and have provided simple tools for enabling each individual user to get the information they need from the sites they like, the topics they follow and from interesting people.  For publishers, we have focused on providing an open distribution platform aimed at extending publisher’s reach and exposure through automated distribution and organization.  This framework will provide the foundation to enable publishers to capture more critical data and eventually monetize the distribution of their content.

While we have experienced tremendous growth in the short time our platform has been open, we are still young and focused on making improvement to best serve our community of users and publishers.  Our intention for this post is to start of on-going discourse regarding the evolution of the news graph, which we invite you all to contribute to.  We believe the news graph is a critical component to ensuring that consumers have an effective way to access the best information available for their unique interests and needs, as well as enabling publishers to capitalize on providing quality content.

Coming soon: The Working Parts of the News Graph

I think the API model is a great example for the newspaper industry. It allows them to stop worrying so much about their distribution problem and get back to doing what they do best – producing content. Let the rest of the developer community worry about finding ways to get the news to readers. But I’m not so sure the Times thinks about their API this way, and the announcement that they’ll be erecting a pay wall in the coming year seems to reinforce that doubt.

It seems like the Times sees this API as a way to establish itself as the definitive archive of all events past – the lens through which history is viewed and dissected. As such, it will be incredibly valuable, allowing historians and documentarians to uncover meta-trends and write fascinating feature pieces about them (who they’ll get to publish those pieces, well…). But when I think API, thanks to Twitter, I think “now.” I think about developers building great experiences around the wealth of content that belongs to the Times, about innovative new ways to organize and discover its content, about new solutions to the old media problem. The Times’ management, I fear, does not share my sentiments.

If the pay wall goes up – and I’m not entirely convinced it actually will – the API either becomes far less useful or far more useful, depending on the restrictions applied. I find it hard to believe that it will exist in its current form, with open access to all articles one hour after publication. I could be wrong. I hope I am.

The point of all this rambling, you ask? The point is that the Times seems like a two-headed monster to me. Half the time, they do everything right – the first to truly incorporate lots of multimedia, the first to successfully incorporate the blog form, the first to understand the web as an opportunity and not a threat. The the other half of the time, they seem trapped in the same delusional nostalgia that’s handicapping the rest of the industry – the display ad run-around, the formatting stalemate, and now the paywall. I suspect that there’s considerable internal tension between these two forces as well. And I’m not sure who will win.

Maybe the pay wall will work for the Times. But its life span, as far as I see, is inherently limited. No matter what we believe in, no matter how long it takes, the price of content will eventually reach zero. There’s just no way the generation that’s coming up behind us will swallow a monthly fee for access to a publication that holds no emotional or collective social value for them.

I give the Times credit for trying something – anything – to stop the revenue drain that’s been their standard operating procedure for the last few years. But they should keep looking for a long-term solution – one that’s closer to the API than the pay wall.