Drupal

Let people know what poker blogs you read every day by creating your own widget. It also allows you to collect all of your own poker blog headlines if you use several blogging platforms. This is a simple trick for those who write a few poker blogs at a time and would like to add a simple widget to their sites with the latest headlines. The widget can be created by using Google Reader service.

Such a widget can be added to Blogspot or any other blogging service which allows custom HTML/script codes. Some of Wordpress-based blog services do not support it, so you may not be able to add the widget. The Wordpress.com platform is one of them.

There are two kinds of widgets:

1. Displaying all posts from all of the blogs that one has subscribed to in a set category (you can add even 1 blog subscription per category if you want). For example, I have subscribed to PokerStars Blog, Tao of Poker and all the my.PokerNews.com blogs. I set a category (it is called a label or a folder in Google Reader) and called it “Best Poker Blogs”. The widget will display posts from these 3 blogs.
2. Displaying only selected posts from subscribed blogs. The widget displays only the posts that one wants to share by marking them at the bottom of each post.

There are thousands of poker blogs, but only tens of them are worth reading and subscribing to their RSS feeds because of information quality and frequency. We have presented best 10 general poker blogs already. Let us present another 10 poker blogs managed by the well known poker brands. Biggest online poker rooms have their own poker blogs which are used as news about their promotions and masterminded players. Sometimes they are even written by the team Pros, therefore interesting and worth attention. However readers should be aware, that the goal of such blogs is to promote the particular brand and surrounding services, including gaming.

As in the first part of this article series, we should warn about the grading. 1st or 10th position does not mean superiority of the blog. This is not evaluation, so places are given based on author’s decision (personal author’s position is that some blogs, which are not so well known, should not be placed in the bottom ).

Which poker-related Facebook pages could be interesting to poker players and worth following? We described the first 10 and yet another 10 in the previous articles. Finding them was a rather easy task, but now comes a very difficult one, as there are simply not many left. The majority of poker fan pages are neglected or spammed by their members, so it is quite hard to separate the gold from the ashes.

However, let’s continue with another TOP10 of the follow worthy pages:

Best Poker Moments (website) is a very interesting and worth following Facebook page as it updates the followers with the best (according to the page) poker videos from various online sources. Some of them belong to the poker classics, some contain bloopers and other interesting and worth time-wasting poker pro videos. Poker 2.0 highly recommends following this Fan Page. Approximately 2,600 fans.

Poker 2.0 has recently started to investigate the most popular poker blogs. A few of the oldest and most respected ones have been created and hosted at Blogger.com which is constantly criticized for not bringing the updates necessary for its users. As we continue to analyze the blog engines designed specifically for poker players in some poker communities and social networks, we discover that some of them not only have a number of highly advanced blogging features, but are even determined to improve after reading our articles. In Part 1 and Part 2 we have already introduced 12 poker blogging engines. This article, being the last one this year, will analyze 7,5 more blogging services (why 7 and a half? Because I could not login and write the starting blog at the 8th blogging service – FlopTurnRiver, so its evaluation is not very accurate and is based only on the view from the outside). Those who did not read our previous analysis, should know that we evaluate the blogs in the scale from 0 to 5 based on the following 10 criteria:

1. Visibility to the non-members of the blogging platform
2. The editing of the text + embedding external media (YouTube or any other video, flash replayer etc.) options
3. Tools to customize the design and the looks of the blog
4. Possibility to manage the URI (the ending of the link) of a single blog post
5. Possibility to share it with your friends and various social networks
6. RSS feature availability
7. Is the blog SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly?
8. Does it have a statistics engine
9. Scheduling and privacy options
10. Tagging and categorizing your blog posts

Some people would say, that if you are not on Facebook, you do not exist at all or simply do not know what a computer is :) No idea what computers have to do with it, as Facebook has a wonderful iPhone app and a mobile version, so it is a perfect way of communicating with no boundaries. If you are on Facebook, you might face another problem – too much information, especially if you are a poker player. We would like to give you some guidelines on which poker pages should be followed.

The information quality in Facebook Pages (same as friends, only belong to some public person or brand) is a matter of discussion. If a website puts only an RSS feed in their Facebook page and nothing else, can it be a quality resource? Most probably NOT. If the website provides all its updates with links promoting some online deals, urging to sign-up, to subscribe, to download or try something out, it also can NOT be considered a quality resource. Some interesting and useful information gathered in 1 place, discussions, games and updates at least once a week may indicate a GOOD resource. So let’s look at the poker pages which provide quality information and should be followed.

There are thousands various poker blog on the internet. Most of them are plane garbage created just for link building or affiliate marketing. SEO rules the poker World; therefore lots of blogs are created just for the sake of keywords and not for some meaningful content or discussion of poker industry issues. Poker 2.0 Blog would like to introduce some short reviews of quality poker blogs. All of them can be followed by using any RSS reader. Some of them have Twitter accounts and even Facebook fan pages.

Here are a few groups of poker blogs in the market:

• General poker blogs – the blogs written by online poker players, businessmen and professional writers. They usually prefer to stay anonymous or just refuse to tell their real names. Well, a nickname is quite enough these days, so there is no need to elucidate their real personalities. These blogs cover everything that is happening in the poker world + the writer's personal life.
• Brand poker blogs – usually official or non-official blogs of the online poker rooms which mainly focus on the poker room's features, promotion deals and the achievements of the supported poker pros. Fulltilt and PokerStars have tons of pros, therefore there is always something to write about.
• Poker Pro Blogs – the blogs written by the poker pros (this might be done by the pros themselves, their agents or by some Public Relations agency). The blogs are mostly about their personal life, poker tournaments, online play and some business they are involved.
• Specific poker blogs – the blogs dedicated to some niche topics, just like Poker 2.0. They analyze only the narrow poker topics. I bet you wouldn't approve if the Poker 2.0 Blog would involve some ‘played-with-my-cat’ or ‘saw-through-the-window’ stories or my holiday photos .