Here’s a screenshot of a Blogger blog with a chat box embedded in the main column:


These steps are easy enough for anyone, but if you have any trouble, you can contact Chatroll Support via live chat or email. Let’s get straight to it!

1. Create a Chatroll live forum to use for your chat box.
   Go to Chatroll and click the button to create a live forum. Choose a name that fits with your blog, as this name will appear in the chat box title. Write an attractive and detailed description so that people can easily find your new Chatroll forum (this will also help drive traffic to your blog).
   
2. Copy the chat window embed code from your live forum’s home page.
   In your new live forums’s home page (the page that is shown after your forum has been successfully created) copy the embed code from the text box labeled ‘embed’. This text box is located under the chat window, as shown below:
   
3. Edit your Layout in Blogger.
   In Blogger, click on the “Layout” tab to show your blog’s layout:
   
4. Add a new HTML/Javascript gadget.
   On your blog’s layout screen, click the “Add a Gadget” link to open the Add a Gadget window:
   
   In the Add a Gadget window, scroll down and find the “HTML/Javascript” gadget. Click on the “+” icon to add it.
   
5. Paste the Chatroll embed code into the HTML/Javascript gadget.
   On the new HTML/Javascript gadget screen, enter a title for the gadget. A good title should alert your readers that this is your site’s live chat. Here’s the important part: Paste the chat window embed code into the Content area (this is the code you copied from Chatroll in step 2):
   
   Finally, click “Save”. The gadget should now be visible in your blog’s layout.

That’s it! You’ve just chat-enabled your Blogger or Blogspot blog! You can now use the Blogger Layout tab to drag the chat box widget wherever you want in your blog’s layout.

Here’s a few more tips for best results:

• Position the chat box so it appears on every page: For best results, place the chat box where it will appear on every page, so that your readers can continue their conversation even if they move from one page to another within your blog.
• Match the chat box colors and size to your blog’s template: To further maximize your chat widgets’s success, you’ll want to customize it to match your site design. Chatroll lets you customize the position, size, and color of the chat to fit in perfectly with your blog’s template. Each time you customize the chat, simply click “Edit” on the chat gadget in the Blogger Layout page and re-paste the embed code.

Thank you for reading, we hope this article has been useful for you. Feel free to contact Chatroll Support if you need any help. Enjoy your new Chatroll chat box widget!

1. Create a live forum to use for your Wordpress chat box. Go to Chatroll and click the button to create a forum. Choose a name that fits with your blog, as this name will appear in the chatbox title. Write an attractive and detailed description so that people can easily find your forum.
   
2. Copy the embed code from your forum’s home page. In your newly created live forums’s home page (for example, http://chatroll.com/technology/the-chatroll-blog) copy the embed code from the text box labeled ‘embed’, located under the chat window as shown below:
   
3. Paste the embed code into the Wordpress HTML Editor. In Wordpress, open the post where you want the chatbox to appear. You MUST switch to the HTML editor! The Wordpress Visual Editor will break the pasted code!
   
4. Reload your blog to see the embedded chatbox. You should now see a fully functional chat box in your Wordpress blog.

You’re done! Here’s what your chat box should look like:

Congratulations, you’ve just chat-enabled your Wordpress blog! If you have any problems along the way, just head over to the Chatroll Support forum and ask for help.

You’ve now covered the basics, but you’ll want to tweak your embedded chat box to maximize its success. Chatroll lets you customize the position, size, and color of the chat box to fit in perfectly with your site and make the most of reader participation.

Simply click the “Customize” link from the Chatroll group that you are in and a set of options will appear for you to set your colors, size and sound.

With a wide range of live blogging tools and many helpful voices around the ‘net, it may not be long before you perform your first live blog. To help you out, we’ve put together 4 essential tips for a successful live blog experience.

Tip #1: Know your audience (a.k.a. Do you really need to live blog the event?)

Before you invest valuable time learning live blogging tools and attempting to live blog a real event, ensure the result will be useful to your audience.

• Who, exactly, is your audience? Just you? A small, private group of people (such as your company or press team)? Hundreds or thousands of people on your public site or blog? This will determine the tools and level of process you’ll need to successfully cover the event.
• Does your audience really need the live coverage, or would a summary suffice? With a standard blog post, people can skip over content they don’t care about (possibly even the whole article). This can be a very positive thing for you as a publisher. People like having things summarized and laid out for them, and like being able to ignore information they don’t care about.
• Will your audience be available? If the event is happening during typical school or business hours, most people simply won’t be able to tune in, and it may be better to go with a standard article they can view at a time that’s convenient to them.

Tip #2: Pick the right live blogging tools for the job

There are plenty of tools available to help you with live blogging. The key is to pick the right one. Here are a few of the tools available to you:

• Email and Instant Messaging - If your audience is a small private group, regular email and IM can be a good solution. Upside: it doesn’t require any set-up, and everyone understands it. Downside: email is not truly live, and most email and IM systems are text-only.
• Microblogging Tools - Microblogging tools like Twitter can be valuable for live events, in particular when your audience is larger. Upside: these services offer powerful filtering capabilities and the ability to use the service via mobile phones. Downside: the tools can be challenging for some users, which may or may not be a barrier depending on your audience.
• Dedicated Live Blogging Tools - Dedicated live blogging tools such as CoverItLive have been improving in quality and popularity. Upside: these services offer a wide range of features specifically designed for live blogging, such as polls, media, and replaying. Downside: dedicated tools can have a steeper learning curve.
• Live Forums - Services like Chatroll can offer the best of both worlds. Like email and IM, everyone understands the live chat feature of live forums. Upside: live forums combine the simplicity of live chat with the richness of more advanced tools. Downside: the live chat is open to your audience, so audience moderation could be an issue.

With such a wide range of tools, picking the right one can be a challenge. As always, put your audience first. Pick the tool that best suits their level of technical ability and their need for advanced features.

Tip #3: Prepare (and be mindful of the event organizers and other attendees)

Prepare by doing a test run using your tools of choice. Ensure your audience knows where and when the live blog will take place. With Chatroll, for example, you could embed the live chat directly on your site and give your readers a specific time to attend.

Check with event organizers before live blogging an event. Respect their legal rights and other event policies. The NCAA was reported to have blocked live bloggers from baseball games. Also consider your equipment- is it permitted? Depending on whether you plan to stream live audio or video, you may have more than just a laptop: check that any cameras and/or microphones are good to go as well.

Be mindful of the other event attendees. Will people around you be distracted by your typing? If there is a lot of audience interaction, will you be able to fully participate with other audience members?

Tip #4: Learn from others’ experience

Live blogging is a whole new kind of activity, and people are still learning how to best live blog an event. Luckily, a wealth of resources can be found all over the internet. Here are a few we’ve found valuable:

• Live Blogging Tips - Lee Odden
• Liveblogging Best Practices - Jeffrey Keefer
• The Art of Live Blogging - Beth Kanter

Conclusion

Live blogging is poised to change the way people follow live events. From conferences, technology events, and product launches, to political debates and sports events, live blogging has the potential of letting people be “present” without physically being there. This can enable a whole new means to engage with your audience.

We’ve put together 3 easy-to-follow steps to embed a chat room in your blog or website using Chatroll live forums. All Chatroll live forums can be easily used as embedded chat rooms. Here’s how:

1. Choose a live forum to use for your chat room. Go to Chatroll and explore the existing live forums. You can browse forums by category or search forums by keyword. If you prefer to make your own forum (for example, a forum named after your blog or web site), you can easily create a forum instead.
2. Copy the embed code from the forum’s home page. On the forum’s home page (for example, http://chatroll.com/food/recipe-share) you’ll find a text box labeled ‘embed’ under the chat window. Click the embed code and copy it.
3. Paste the embed code in your blog or web site. Paste the code where you would like the chat room to appear in your site. If you have a blog, you can either place the chat room in individual posts, or you can create a dedicated page on your blog to host the chat.

(IMPORTANT: If you are using the Wordpress Visual Editor, or other visual editors, make sure to switch to HTML editor mode, otherwise Wordpress will remove the embed code! This is a known issue with Wordpress.)

That’s it! You should now have a fully functional chat room in your blog. Here’s what it should look like:

The Chatroll Blog | Forum home

You can now hang out in your new chat room by opening the page where you embedded the chat. It’s that easy! Go ahead and visit Chatroll to customize your profile and learn what else you can do with your chat room, such as posting videos, photos, links, and more. If you have any questions, head over to the Chatroll feedback forum and members of the Chatroll team will be happy to help!

Today, everyone and their mother is going “social”, from blogs about cat pictures to long-time internet and software giants like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft.

So what’s making this phenomenon tick? I’d like to suggest that communication is at the heart of the shift toward social applications and the social internet.

There are a few likely suspects when it comes to figuring out the social networking phenomenon:

• Social proof. We all like having social connections, and (for most people) the more connections the better. It’s called social proof. It’s the idea that people take cues about other people and things based on how other people associate with those people or things. In social networking, the more friends you have, the more likely there is reason for people think highly of you. Social networks can act as an “online popularity contest”. Not all people use social networks this way, but it’s a powerful force at play.
• Entertainment. Vampires and zombies don’t lie. All people love to have fun, and especially with each other. There’s a great post over at Silicon Valley Insider, Confirmed: Facebook Apps are Useless. They point out data to back up the idea that the most successful social applications are intended purely for fun. If you ask most people why they use social networks, you’ll usually hear a variation of “it’s fun” more than “it’s useful”. Could social networking be the biggest form of entertainment to hit the 21st century?
• Content Sharing. Sharing of both personal and public content has turned out to be a killer app of social networking. How many people really shared their pictures online before Facebook got big? Some of you may remember photo sharing sites like ImageStation (now dead) and Ofoto (now Kodak Gallery). While popular, these sites have not achieved mainstream success. So who’s the winner? As of now, it looks to be Facebook. People simply find it a lot easier to share their pictures (and other content) where their friends are.

And finally…

• Communication. The major forms of communication built into most social networking sites are some of the most heavily-used features. These include: inboxes, walls, status messages, notes, and comments. Some people have even forgone trusty old email in favor of using their social network as their primary means of communication. The first social networks started with simply a profile picture, profile details, and some form of a wall, and drove most of their usage via communication.

Communication holds a special spot in this list. In a sense it underlies everything people do on social networks. Social proof, entertainment, and content sharing all involve communication at some level. In a sense, the social network is a new communication medium along which people broadcast and receive various bits of information. Whether it’s personal data, a move in a game, or a new photo, it’s information traveling from one person to another along the social graph. The social network is really a new communication network.

Going forward, only time will tell what new social applications rise to prominence, and what value we as a society can derive from social networks. One thing, however, is for sure: communication has been and will be a key factor creating value and driving usage in social networks.

Chatroll is the first community of live forums, so the challenges are all new and there is a lot of experimenting involved, but we’ve made some big steps along the way, and we’re very happy to share some of the results with you!

Not counting all the little tweaks and improvements, here are the BIG changes you can see in action on Chatroll:

• New Colors! - Gone are the old blue and gray, and in are new friendly green and blue. We’ve also gone with the “web 2.0″ style of glossy buttons and headings. The new colors make the interface that much more easy on the eyes when you’re online for a long period of time, as you are likely to do if you’re online during the whole UEFA Euro 2008 tournament!
• New Front Page Look - The front page now features 3 of the most popular forums at the top. This gives the front page more of a magazine-style look. It’s a fine balance between displaying as much content as possible on every page, while keeping that content looking its best.
• Flexible Layout - Chatroll now looks a lot better no matter what size of screen you have! Whether you have the biggest new widescreen or that reliable 90’s workhorse desktop with a 14″ screen, Chatroll will look great for you. Forums with a lot of content, such as the Music Videos forum, will appreciate the added space.
• Most Active Users - The most active users on Chatroll are now visible on every page, near the bottom-right. This list is completely live, so you always know who’s online and who’s active. This feature is immensely helpful for meeting new members.

Seeing all your live forums on one screen is a great way to have group chats with others interested in what you’re interested in. Normally that much information would lead to massive information overload. We’ve put a lot of effort into creating the best group chat interface out there, and we hope you’ll find that tracking all your interests live is that much more manageable and fun!

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback and ideas for future improvement. But for now, go check it out!

And what better way to get the blog started than by answering the simple question: “What is Chatroll?”

Put simply, Chatroll is a place to create and share live forums. It’s a place you go to join others in sharing and discussing your interests in a rich and live environment. Chatroll is built by its users: every forum is user-created and all content is user-generated. Really though, no description will do it justice. Chatroll is designed to be EXPERIENCED. Remember the first time you used an iPod, and just “got it”? Our users’ experience with Chatroll is similar: once they “get it”, they fall in love.

Feel like getting a bit more technical? What is Chatroll’s “secret sauce” so to say? Behind Chatroll is a new concept for human interaction called a Live Forum. The emphasis here is on LIVE. Chatroll is a whole new breed of consumer web application. Most social networking, social bookmarking, and media sites on the internet today are dynamic sites, meaning users are able to contribute in an asynchronous many-to-many fashion. Chatroll does all of that and more. It’s a fully live and immersive environment for rich user interaction, providing a fully synchronous many-to-many communication medium.

So what does this techy stuff mean? Ultimately, it means that using Chatroll is a completely unique experience that feels as natural and expressive as having a real-life conversation. Our users have found a huge variety of uses for this new approach to communication. From movie reviews to mixed martial arts fighting, from cooking recipes to tech support forums, the possibilities for our users are truly limitless. Part of the excitement for us is just seeing what our users come up with next!

To conclude the first post, we welcome you to the Chatroll Blog, and hope you’ll find plenty of opportunities here to educate yourself and educate others about Live Forums. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the blog via RSS or email (the link is at the top-right of the page) and you’ll get all of our articles sent to you automatically!