Your favorite poker blogs' headline widget

Date: Wed, Jan 13, 2010 Internet

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.

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Poker Questions and Answers

Date: Wed, Dec 16, 2009 Internet

When you do not know something about poker, you simply go to Google and try searching. Sometimes, the search results are disappointing, because they do not contain the information you were looking for. Fortunately, there is another way. Just post your poker query at one of the poker question and answer sites and wait a couple of days for it to be answered by the poker players. If the answer does not satisfy you, try doing the same at some other similar site.

Poker question and answer (Q&A) sites can be easily called a web 2.0 tool, as their content is submitted and generated by the users. However, there are some sites that make a selection of questions and hand them to poker professionals to answer. Sometimes these services are payed, so we will not go too deep into this area. Just mentioning one of the free question and answer sites – pokerquestions.net where questions should be submitted in a special “contact us” like form. The same situation is with pokeranswers.com, but they do not give the 24 hour guarantee for answering the submitted question.

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Zynga's Texas Holdem vs. PlayFish Poker Rivals

Date: Tue, Dec 1, 2009 Internet

The battle of the 2 largest social online gaming companies continues in poker. PlayFish had recently dropped a white napkin to Zynga with the new game called Poker Rivals. Zynga's Texas Holdem is undoubtedly the biggest online poker room in the World with millions of daily users. Their competitors (Playdom’s Poker Palace, Poker World, Pokerbuddies, PlanetPoker etc.) are tens of times smaller, but are still much bigger than the real money poker rooms. Real money poker has more than 100 brands in the market while play money social gaming poker rooms can be counted on the fingers of two arms. Social gaming companies know that and try to grab a piece of the market by selling their play chips (main source of income).

Zynga and PlayFish are the biggest players in the social online gaming market (let’s not forget Playdom with their no. 2 poker application PokerPalace) always competing and creating similar games. Here's an example:

• Food management games – Zynga’s Café World vs. Playfish Restaurant City
• Farm management games – Zynga’s FarmVille vs. Playfish Country Story

The most popular PlayFish game is Pet Society. Zynga still does not have anything like it. Zynga’s most popular game was Texas Holdem, but it had now dropped in popularity after the rise of FarmVille. Just a month ago Playfish still didn't have any similar poker game to compete with, but now they've launched Poker Rivals, and the situation has changed.

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Top 5 Facebook poker rooms excluding Zyga's Texas Holdem

Date: Mon, Nov 23, 2009 Internet

We all know that PokerStars and FullTilt are not the World’s largest online poker rooms. The biggest one is Zynga’s Texas Holdem available on Facebook. It does not have real money games, but it has lots of other interesting features – social interaction, competing against your friends, achievements and titles, referring system which works as a virus etc. Even though it does not have the biggest pots or a lot of poker pros playing there, it still brings 19 million people to its poker tables everyday. PokerStars holds the World record for the highest player traffic with 307 thousand players online.

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10 best poker blogs: Poker Pros

Date: Mon, Nov 9, 2009 Internet

Which poker pro is your favorite? Phil Ivey or Chris “Jesus” Ferguson? They are both TOP level pros and definitely have something to say about their travels, tournaments they play in, their videos and lots of other interesting stuff a poker pro does every day. And although they both have their official blogs, they do not blog regularly. Actually only a few of the top level poker players update their blogs often and write about the things that are interesting to their fans.

We have already presented the TOP 10 General Poker Blogs and Top 10 Poker brand blogs. Now it is time to check which poker pros write their own blogs and which ones are actually good at it.

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Poker content and news aggregators

Date: Thu, Oct 29, 2009 Internet

One of the latest web 2.0 trends is content aggregators. They select some particular online resources and expose their RSS information sorted by particular topics. In other words, you can see the best RSS feeds from trustworthy news sources and blogs about jobs, cars, fashion, music, even Lady Gaga and of course poker and gambling. The online resources are selected by editors, therefore no useless information gets through.

Content aggregators help high quality blogs and websites distribute their content (mainly news and blogs). Some of the aggregators are SEO friendly, so staying there longer can impact the search engine results as they usually have quite good Google positions. Traffic details may also indicate good quality, as feeds are usually displayed in the related information page (not like StumbleUpon with its accidental traffic).

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10 Facebook pages every poker player should be a Fan of (Part 4)

Date: Mon, Oct 19, 2009 Internet

Although it’s getting harder and harder to find quality Facebook poker fan pages, we have managed to collect 10 more. This gets us very close to reaching the goal of the Top 50 poker-related Facebook pages being collected in 2009. Some of the pages discussed in this part have only been created recently, but it seems that they have been managed by the professionals. Maybe the author of the Poker 2.0 blog should revive some of the dead Facebook poker pages by tracking their founders?

Let’s continue with another TOP10 of the follow-worthy pages:

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10 best poker blogs: Poker Brands

Date: Mon, Oct 5, 2009 Internet

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 ).

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Facebook pages every poker player should be Fan of (Part 3)

Date: Fri, Sep 25, 2009 Internet

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.

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Facebook pages every poker player should be a Fan of (Part 2)

Date: Thu, Sep 17, 2009 Internet

Last week we have started analyzing the best poker-related Facebook Fan Pages. It appears that there are more than 10 quality resources, therefore we bring you another list. Here are the 5 categories to which the Facebook poker fan pages are assigned:

1. General poker pages
2. Global poker brands
3. Local poker brands
4. Poker websites
5. Poker pro fan pages

Here is another list of TOP10 pages which are worth following:

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Poker Blog Engines. Part 3

Date: Mon, Sep 14, 2009 Internet

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

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Facebook pages every poker player should be a Fan of (Part 1)

Date: Thu, Sep 10, 2009 Internet

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.

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10 best poker blogs: General

Date: Mon, Sep 7, 2009 Internet

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 .

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Poker leagues go social with PokerDIY

Date: Mon, Aug 31, 2009 Internet

From the social network and web 2.0 perspective, the 80% of the poker league consists of the poker community and 20% of the social network as the players are related both as colleagues and as competitors. The league is based on the achievement process – people must complete various tasks, get points and rank in the leaderboards. The interaction between players forms a social network – they communicate in the forum, update their status, use the internal messaging, write blogs, upload pictures and videos to share their experience and educate the newbies.

PokerDIY is a little bit different from the social network point of view. It provides much more web 2.0 tools than any other poker social network. As the RSS widget is no longer the 8th miracle of the Word, the poker league Facebook application and the iPhone app are definitely worth your attention as they are the first ones in the market. Blogging is not so important at this rather old poker social network, but people still post. There is always a member who has something to say to their peers and to the community.

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