Google Books is preparing to sell access to books. Wow! Better get ready, info product authors.

How this will work is that Google will enable people who find your book via search to instantly purchase access to it. So, begin preparing your ebooks on how to drive organic searches of your ebooks right away. It is an obvious, enormous wave of potential surging toward all of us.

Google will be acting as the broker, enforcing DRM, and extending the reach of ebooks. As usual for the Google crew, this will completely change the game. I think this is being completely overlooked by most infoproduct developers. Yes, Google appears to be targeting print-book publishers, but there is no reason at all that this won’t work for us too.

Gentlemen, start your planning!

Technorati Tags: google, ebooks, google book search

Let the world know that you are actively adding content to your blog. This just takes a moment to set up, and pays off with more timely and accurate search crawls of your site. To do this, you need to choose an “update notification pinger”. Once you’ve chosen one or two, you configure your blogging engine to use them. In Wordpress, this is managed in the admin pages under “Options, Writing, Update services.”

What this does is send a notification to a service that you’ve updated your blog. While you could have your blog send notifications to every service around, I think manually setting up every one is just not worth the aggravation, so I suggest using a “meta-pinging” service. These services will pick up your update notification and relay it to many other blog search and aggregation sites. I like using Pingoat to do this, with Feedburner as a backup.

Refer to Technorati’s nice configuration howto for details on setting up b2, Blogger, Ecto, MarsEdit, Movable Type, Nucleus, Radio UserLand, TypePad, and WordPress to use ping services.

Ping services to choose from

• pingoat - PRO: has a rep for reliability, and a LOT of services, Google sitemap generator is a great tool, free. CON: May tag you as a “splog” if you are overly focused on marketroid speak. Services: 1engine.com, Weblogs.com AudioRPC, a2b.cc, amagle.com, bakeinu.jp, bitacoles.net, bitacoras.com, bitacoras.net, blo.gs, blog-search.net, blogdb.jp, blogdigger.com, bloggers.jp, blogmatcher.com, blogmura.jp, blogoon.net, blogpeople.net, blogrolling.com, blogshares.com, blogstreet.com, blogstyle.jp, bulkfeeds.net, catapings.com, cocolog-nifty.com, coreblog.org, dontpushme.com, effbot.org, feedburner.com, feedster.com, focuslook.com, freshpodcasts.com, geourl.org, gpost.info, icerocket.com, ipodder.org, longrank.com, memigo.com, moreover.com, my.yahoo.com, newsgator.com, newsisfree.com, pubsub.com, rubhub.com, syndic8.com, technorati.com, technorati.jp, topicexchange.com, veneblogs.com, weblogalot.com, weblogs.com, weblogs.se, weblogues.com
  Ping server address: http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
• FeedBurner - PRO: nice interface, great services in general, fast, free. CON: not that many services. Services: Blog Buzz Machine, Feedster, Icerocket, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Ping-o-matic, PubSub, RssFwd, Syndic8, TailRank, Technorati, Weblogs.com, blogdigger
• Ping-o-matic - PRO: many many services available as options, free. CON: Seems to be down a lot. Services: A2b GeoLocation, Audio.Weblogs, Blo.gs, BlogRolling, BlogShares, BlogStreet, Blogdigger, Feed Burner, Feedster, GeoURL, Icerocket, Moreover, My Yahoo, News is Free, NewsGator, PubSub, RubHub, Syndic8, Technorati, Topic Exchange, Weblogalot, Weblogs.com
  Ping server: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
• Blog Flux - PRO: interesting other services besides just the pinging. CON: ??? (comments welcome) Services: 1740, A2b.cc, Audio.weblogs.com, Bakeinu, Bitacoles.net, Bitacoras.com, Bitacoras.net, Blo.gs, Blogbot.dk, Blogdb, Blogdigger, Blogg.de, Bloggers.jp, Blogmura, Blogoon, Blogrolling, Blogshares, Bulkfeeds, Catapings.com, Feedburner, Feedster, Geourl.org, Goo, Moreover, My Yahoo, Odeo, Rubhub, Sourceforge, Syndic8, Technorati, Weblogs, Weblogues.com
  Ping Server address: http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
• technorati - Not a meta-pinger, but they are very important and they suggest direct pinging.
  Ping Server address: http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Technorati Tags: ping services, xml-rpc, pingoat, pingomatic, blogflux, feedburner