By: Tim Nash

A while ago I discussed on Collective Thoughts some of the techniques for getting your site into News syndication services like Google News. One of the main area's I looked at was images since then a few things have changed but the importance of good images and their uses have not.

What's a logo image?

A logo image is the initial image in a post often it takes the form of a banner or image to determine category. It's this image that is being picked up by Social Media sites for use, before going into specifics lets take a few examples; My Own Category Logos: Banners: ProBlogger Category Banner Original credit Xdjio DoshDosh Dosh Dosh site makes great use of Anime to create unique logo's for each post Lorelle Wordpress Tips Lorelle uses category images on nearly all her posts

Logo Images and Social Media Sites?

Each site handles images slightly differently but lets look at the big two Digg and StumbleUpon; StumbleUpon StumbleUpon has now like Digg started using images on it's pages, both in the review page and peoples favourites. Normally these pictures are screenshots of the page but sometimes they are pictures from the page cropped. As you can see Sebastian's MSN crawler update bug has been cropped. In this case the surface area of 250x165px was used in reality it's more likely to have been 250x166.666~ or a ratio of 3:2. The images when shown in favourites are 90x60. The ratio is determined on the width, so far I have seen 150, 175, 200, 250px as the base width. Digg Digg resizes images to 160x120 (4:3) or 160x160 (1:1) normally this is a straight resize but some images are showing sign of cropping.

Creating the Perfect sized image

So what would the perfect image for Social media look like size wise... I notice a problem, with perhaps the exception of problogger community banner I don't think any of us are close! so this leads me to...

Throw out the rule book

Images are going to be more important a striking image can make the difference between sitting at the top and bottom of the social pile. But the thing about striking images is they tend to not follow ratio rules or ideas of "perfect images" so ultimately this was perhaps my longest and most pointless post, I hope you skipped to the end first.