Spam Filtering

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.  You’re always protected up-to-the-second from the latest dirty tricks of spammers. There’s no need to create and maintain a blacklist of email addresses.

Search Engine Optimization

There are quite a few of these types of plugins, but two plugins are especially easy to use to create and improve your blog’s ability to rank well on search engines.

All In One SEO PackGoogle XML Sitemaps
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For WordPress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• You can fine-tune everything
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Social Networking

This is a crucial function that allows readers who find your Posts useful and informative to pass it on, as well as submit it to various RSS feeds or communities such as Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.

Share This
An example of this is at the end of this post.

Site Statistics

Even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer.   That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

This program will begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on our servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.

Comments

A great blogging feature is the ability for your readers to interact with your site.  Providing your visitors with the ability to comment on your posts will give thme a sense of ownership and a more personalized touch.

Subscribe to Comments is a robust function that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries.  The function includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address

Podcasting

• Full featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM and BitTorrent RSS)
• Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes
• Podcast Download stats, with cool graphs. See below.
• Support for Premium Content (Pay Only)
• Makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple
• View MP3 Files ID3 tags when your Posting
• Control over where the player will display within your post and what it will look like.
• Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
• Supports unlimited number of media files.
• Automatic Media player for MP3, RM, OGG, MP4, MOV, QT, FLV, ASF, WMV, AVI, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
• Preview image for videos
• Support for seperate Category podcasts

I ran a quick check on “tax blogs” on Google …. (I was #6 as of today …, and took a quick look at some of the tax blogs out there.  Here are just some quick observations that I made …

The Wall Street Journal Tax Blog, which is at #3 on Google for tax blogs” hasn’t been updated since April 19, 2007, 12:12 am.  What I found interesting is that The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog is continously updated and even had a December 31st Year-End posting.  I also noted that the Tax Blog page has some advertisement errors, no “About This Blog” and is just generally out of date. 

I also noted that the WSJ tax blog entries, for the most part, relate to technical and mechanical aspects of taxes, while the WSJ law blog entries have more “personalities” involved.  For example, take a look at some of these headlines, and see if you can guess which ones are on the tax blog and which is on the law blog:

1. The Risks of Being Audited
2. Burris Could Be Illinois’s Senator, But Was He a Good AG?
3. Vicki Iseman: Is She a Public or Private Figure?
4. The ABCs of Dealing With the AMT
5. Reprieves for Filers
6. Trees and the Law: Judge Kaye’s Last Legal Issue

Is this just the nature/differences between the two professions that is simply exhibited in the blogosphere.  After all, there are very few TV shows or movies that feature accounting, but a slew of shows that feature lawyers and legal issues (LA Law, Boston Legal, The Firm, etc.).   There are many more fiction books relating to law than accounting/tax (see John Grisham, “To Kill a Mockingbird”). 

Golden Marketing’s Accounting Blog List, as of December 16, 2008, lists 64 accounting firm practice blogs … on the entire internet.  Compare this to Lexblog’s list of over 500 law fim blogs that just they have created.  Kevin O’Keefe of Lexblog estimated back in February of 2008, that the number of law blogs listed on the ABA Journal’s law blog directory of 1,600 would double in the coming year.   I couldn’t find a definitive directory of accounting blogs to make such a comparison, but that fact alone tells me something.

I would welcome any and all comments on why anyone thinks accounting blogs are so far behind law blogs in both the breadth and growth on the web.