Social Networking and Web 2.0

Filed under: Design, Developer, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Blogging, Web services, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Freeware, Social Software

While social media sites seem to be the future of web site aggregation, at least one element of it, there’s one aspect of these sites that is starting to get annoying. Have you noticed some of your favorite sites adding a row and sometimes multiple rows of Links to social news sites, ostensibly to make it easy for visitors to bookmark or save the site on del.icio.us, digg, netscape, reddit, furl, or any number of other sites of this ilk. Of course, there’s also a myriad of service-specific RSS links, so that users of Bloglines, Google Reader, NewsGator, Netvibes, etc. can click on one link and subscribe to the site in the reader of their choice. The thing is, I’m not sure people even use these buttons, particularly when they’re all grouped together; they’ve simply become litter online.

Well, if you’re someone that wants to offer your users the ability to easily subscribe to or bookmark your site, but want to avoid littering your site with all of these site-specific icons, check out Add This. Add This allows you to put a single image link on your site to take your readers to a dedicated bookmarking site page, and another for feed readers. Once there, they can choose the service they’d like to use, and perform the function they’re looking to do. On one hand, all this seems to be doing is cleaning up your pages by putting all the site-specific Links on an intermediate page - something you could arguably do yourself. But there’s more to the Add This service, which makes it more compelling.

Add This aggregates statistics about which pages and site features your readers are collecting in their bookmark collections the most, and provide that data back to you. Assuming the web viewing population uses these Links more than I think they do, this could provide some very valuable information as to what people are truly finding interesting on your site. Personally, I’m still a bit skeptical as to the need for all of these site-specific links. If this trend continues at the rate it’s been going, ad blocking software will also be blocking social media bookmarking links just to provide a cleaner interface for web users. Hey, it’s a thought.
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There are so many questions about Search Engine Optimization services that may cloud your mind. I have listed five of the frequently asked questions. Here they are together with their answers: 1. What is black hat SEO? The term…

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Several websites are now punished by search engines especially Google. Uncoverthenet.com, for instance, has PR 0 because of Google penalty. However, the directory homepage as well as its sub pages still have page rank. In a blog entry entitled…

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PR NEWSWIRE — Nov 27 — Where Are You Now? (WAYN) raised $11 million in Series A funding from a syndicate of investors led by Esprit Capital Partners. Brent Hoberman, co-founder of lastminute.com; Adrian Critchlow and Andy Phillipps, co-founders…

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Finding the right keywords is an important step that you should take seriously if you want to be successful with your web site. New SEO tools help you to find the best keywords for your site.

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Productivity, Web services, Google, Social Software, Unix

Since I’m a card-carrying Google Reader convert, I’ve been loosely following the discussions in its Google Group. I’m constantly impressed with how active some of their engineers like Chris and Mihai are in the conversation, and just the other day they announced some small but much-requested updates and bug fixes to Reader, including:

• First and foremost: An “Add to folder” menu after using the subscribe bookmarklet, the Firefox 2.0 subscribe button and the “Add to Google” button
• The “Feed actions…” menu lets you rename the feed and change its folders
• Some IE 7 display bugs have been fixed
• Some IE 6 display bugs have been fixed
• OPML import should be more tolerant of invalid characters
• The filtering that can be done in the settings page now handles multiple terms (separate them with spaces)
• The settings page should display faster when you have lots of subscriptions

Nothing major, though that ‘Add to folder’ button is a God-send (Google-send?) for adding new subscriptions and easily filing them away without breaking one’s workflow.
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Some blogging trends in India .. based on a study ‘Blogging India: An MSN and Windows Live Report’

“A desire for self-improvement and personal
development is found to be a key driver of India’s blogosphere with a
large majority of online users reading blogs to stay informed about
world events. They enjoy reading about technology the most, followed
closely by news and education. Elsewhere, technology content ranks low.

These findings suggest that blogging in India
could become the “new fourth estate” with close to half the respondents
believing that blogging content is as trustworthy as those of regular
media outlets such as newspapers, radio and TV.”

Some statistics are available here. And the Economic Times has more.

- 14% of internet users actively blog
- 39% are aware of blogs
- over 75% of all bloggers are men

- 85% are below the age of 35
- 49% said they read blogs to be entertained
- 50% found blogs by business leaders interesting
- in contrast, 24% found politicians’ blogs interesting
- 58% started their blog to express themselves, while 40% to entertain others
- Half of all blogs receive 10 visitors or less per week
- 90% of bloggers spend up to 5 hours per week reading blogs or updating their own blogs

Am not sure how the research was conducted, but the article seems to suggest it is based on a survey among over 1000 visitors to the MSN India portal. This is by no means representative blogosphere in India - not many bloggers I know think highly of MSN or go to the portal at all.

Does anyone have access to the entire report and can you share it?

We really do need some good demographic and behavioural statistics on blogging and online social networking in India.

Technorati Tags: blogosphere, India, blogging, blog statistics, blogs

Earlier, Yahoo executives announced that it will be making a facelift to its under the weather 360 degrees. The latter is a social networking feature coupled with blogging services. Nonetheless, said major revamp did not make real big waves….

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If you are an amateur in SEO and your want your website to be the next big thing on the web, consider learning the basics of the battlefield. You might probably ask - where should I start? Perhaps by…

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Filed under: Audio, Internet, Features, News, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Commercial, Freeware, Social Software

A couple weeks back the folks at Pandora just held a town-hall meeting in Denver to discuss Pandora’s history, future, and the things Pandora is planning to do to bring you customized music-listening to you everywhere you go. What is Pandora? If you haven’t heard, Pandora is like an online radio station, but not only that, Pandora helps you find related music based on what artist or song you give it. Pandora creates stations out of your tastes then allows you to tweak the collection of music for that station by thumbing a song up or down. Pandora is really an incredible piece of software that according to Tim Westergren (our town-hall speaker and Pandora founder & CEO) has two main objectives: The first one is to help all those starving musicians get their music to the masses in a way that will help would-be fans find great new stuff. The second is to cater to music listener’s unique tastes by giving them a customizable listening experience, and did I mention it is FREE for the taking? For music fans, casual listeners and even audiophiles, Pandora is the thing to be rocking out to on the net. For those who haven’t seen Pandora, check out this video for a taste, and then get on over to Pandora for goodness’ sake!

The mechanism that runs Pandora’s uncanny magic, the Music Genome Project, is a very complex one that requires almost 400 different “genomes” (scores) per song to be assigned by well-educated music professors and musicians who listen to the song carefully to determine its musical genome or very specific DNA. This process is complicated, and requires these music experts to have a lot of training before they can even use Pandora’s rating system. This idea of pulling these somewhat ethereal musical attributes (call it meta-information if you like) right out of a recording by listening to it is a great one, and Pandora works well because of it.

Many companies have licensed Pandora’s unique “Music Genome” data to better the recommendations on their own music sites, which says something for its high quality. Tim says that though Pandora does much of this today to pay the bills, their focus really is on the artist and the listener, prompting them to take more steps toward getting the music out there for people to listen to, and making it easier for artists to find a voice. Tim gave us some vague details of the things Pandora may or may not be planning, but time frames and even the likelihood of some of these things may be up for grabs. Here are some ideas you might see Pandora putting to good use in next few years:

Continue reading Pandora: The future of music

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Filed under: Internet, Podcasting, Blogging, Social Software

If you have an interest in podcasting, blogging, or any of that other “social media” hooey, then you’ll want to be in Atlanta, Georgia on February 10th, 2007. That’s the date of the as-yet-unnamed social media conference being organized by Sherry Heyl, the Atlanta Media Bloggers, and a bunch of local riff-raff. (If you have any bright ideas for a name, feel free to share.)

Continue reading Save the date: Atlanta social media conference, Feb. 10, 2007

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Have you ever envisioned what the future of World Wide Web would look like? Maybe you are thinking about video or perhaps more sophisticated than that. Nonetheless, it is pretty possible. Google's purchase of YouTube this year has shocked…

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Titles are part of our lives. People can be described by titles - some people like it while other people abhor it. Further, most of the people like giving titles. Why do we need title? Why do we use…

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If you are a Search Engine enthusiast, you must be familiar with Danny Sullivan. The man needs no further introduction for he has established his name in the SEO realm. On December 11, Sullivan will be launching a brand…

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Earlier, Universal Music Group has filed a suit against MySpace.com. Said suit alleges that MySpace illegally encourages its users to share music and music videos on the website without permission. According to the complaint MySpace “encourages, facilitates and participates…

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If you are pretty serious about online marketing and Search Engine Optimization services, you must be ready to face the next big thing dubbed as mobile search engine optimization. Basically, mobile SEO means providing individuals the opportunity to visit,…

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One of the largest gathering of webmasters and SEO called the PubCon has just been concluded a few days ago. One of the important things learned during this event is the talk by Cody Simms, the Sr. Product Manager for…

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MARKETING VOX — Nov 21 — Yahoo is in acquisition talks with contest site Bix and blog community and analytics tool MyBlogLog, in an effort to shore up its social-networking credentials. For MyBlogLog, the portal plans on shelling out…

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MEDIA POST — Nov 20 — Continuing its aggressive campaign to remove unlicensed clips from video-sharing sites, Universal Music Group Friday sued social networking site MySpace for copyright infringement. The suit charges that MySpace doesn't adequately police users from…

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JOURNALISM — Nov 20 — US-based CityTools will enable newspaper publishers to create content networks with one another and draw on articles written by members of the public. Publishers pay $650/month to access articles submitted to CityTools website where…

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