Social Networking and Web 2.0

Filed under: Internet, Security, Blogging, Open Source, Social Software

The hard working folks at WordPress.org have not taken the holidays off. In fact, news broke on Friday of a bug that allowed a would-be hacker access to future, draft, and pending posts.

But WordPress.org has unleashed WordPress 2.3.2 and has labeled the update an “Urgent Security Release”. If you are the purveyor of a WordPress blog, we’d suggest you run right out and update. To get the latest version of WordPress, head over to their download page and install the update.

As an added bonus, WordPress 2.3.2 allows you to define your own custom Database Error Page. At last. No more canned page that screams “I don’t know how to configure MySQL”!

We say thanks to WordPress.org for responding quickly to bugs reported just a few days ago!
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Frustrating but true, web SEO is often left out of the big picture. Or if it is made part of the puzzle, the proven SEO techniques are not utilized. In my entire SEO career, I observe that there are still a good number of web site owners who are not that familiar, if not serious, with Search Engine Optimization.

It is worth reiterating that a successful web site has got something to do with proven SEO techniques. It's no good 'cheaping-out' on your web sites; it will just bite you in the back.

I have observed several SEO mistakes people do, here are some:

1. Creating a 100% image-based web site. The over dependence on images places your site at a greater disadvantage. Why? Google bot and other crawlers can't read images. But the use of the alt attribute is another story.
2. Doing automatic submission. search engines see this as a not-so-unique technique. Sending them a link is insufficient, I tell you.
3. Involving your site in a link farm. Keep away from link farms. It won't do you any good.

Remember that not everything can happen overnight. So hold on to your patience and diligence. Those virtues will keep you going farther in the SEO realm.

See full article.

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Blogging for Your Business - 15 February 2007

search engines and the Queries Behind - 26 March 2007

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The Power Of search engines - 21 August 2007

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Reading SEO blogs is one habit that most of us share but sometimes I also like to listen to SEO podcasts. What I like about these podcasts as compared to radio shows is that a typical radio or (TV talk show) is time specific. Not unless you record it, it is gone forever unlike podcasts where it is usually available for download after the show. You don't have to be “tuned in” at any specific time. For busy people like most of us, that is a big advantage. We can listen to these podcasts anytime we like.

There are lots of podcasts out there but with regards to SEO, these are my 5 Top SEO podcasts choices.

Daily SearchCast
Mr SEO Podcast
SEO 101
Search Pulse
SEO Rockstars

How about you? What SEO postcasts do you like?

Note: This is not in any order.

See full article.

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Phonecaster.de: Podcasts per Telefon - 15 Januar 2006

Guide To Soccer Podcasts - 17 August 2006

Podcasts on Your Smartphone or PDA - 24 January 2007

The Soccer Weblog Guide to Soccer Podcasts 2007 - 22 September 2007

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Filed under: Internet, Kids, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Freeware, Social Software

The internet is full of many wonderful things. However, it is also host to any number to bad influences that parents dread their children being exposed to. Because of this, many companies produce filtering software in an effort to help protect children from profanity.

Glubble’s approach is a little different. Rather than make a futile attempt at blocking everything bad on the internet, it uses a whitelist of sites that are ok for kids to see. It brings together a community of parents, allowing the user to set a pre-defined white list and even use the whitelists of other users. It’s the same sort of powerful social design that make add-ons like Adblock+ so effective.

Not only is Glubble great at keeping kids’ online time rated G, but it also gives Firefox a much more appealing and user friendly look, giving every member of the family an individualized login and portal page, even for the Adults.

Glubble works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and can be downloaded directly here.

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When hiring an SEO expert to take care of your web site, what questions should you ask?

Baffled? Well, right questions should be asked. Otherwise, you could be hiring a mediocre-performing SEO enthusiast. To help you with your interview, All Things SEM has shared some 55 questions. Those questions are pretty essential to gauge how knowledgeable an SEO enthusiast is. There's no use crying over spilled milk. The best way to circumvent it is to do it right the first time.

Additionally, if you are dreaming to be part of the web Search Engine Optimization realm, you need to know the frequently asked as well as important SEO questions. Don't make them make you stupefied and speechless. And the golden rule is: Never go to a battle unarmed. Be prepared that is. Speak your mind and show them what you got. It's an advantage to know in advance the questions that will be thrown at you.

To view the questions, click here.

See full article.

Related Entries:

10 Ideas for High-Performing Web Pages - 24 February 2007

Most Efficient SEO Steps - 18 April 2007

Top 3 SEO Personalities You Should Be Familiar With - 04 August 2007

Maximizing SEO Advantage - 16 October 2007

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Filed under: Internet, Video, Time-Wasters, Social Software, web 2.0

“Poster yourself” is the name of the game, and Glogster is where you play it - although if you google the term you will be asked if you didn’t mean “gangster” instead.

Here’s the premise: you sign up for an account and are quickly ushered to a large Flash rectangle where you can drag and drop images, videos, and sounds. You can use either preloaded images and decorations from the site or upload your own. Then, if you are so inclined, you can play freely with drop-shadows, fonts, add Links, and other gadgetry.

Of course, since this is Web 2.0, there’s the mandatory social aspect where you can add other “Glogsters” to your friend network, rate other people’s glogs, and share your finds. And, if you feel really good about a glog, you can embed it in your website to display your cut-and-paste glory to the world.

Sadly enough, since the preloaded images and decorations that are available fall into cutesy-pink, emo-punk, or bland, you may have to put a little work into getting a glog to look just the way you want. Who knows, with a little elbow grease, you may even end up on the highly coveted “Top Glogs” list.

[via Craft Gossip]
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Filed under: Business, Fun, Internet, Video, Social Software

As new sites that cater to the fetishes of fanboys and girls alike continue to spawn from the depths of Dante’s Inferno, it was only a matter of time until one about shoes emerged. ShoeTube.tv is the name of this incarnation, and it’s promising to deliver almost as many goodies about shoes as there are desserts at your local buffet.

Proclaiming itself the “most exciting thing to happen to shoes since Carrie found those coveted Manolo Blahniks in the closet at Vogue,” it should be obvious how magnificent this site is going to be. The primary draw will be its broadcast quality programming, with just a dash of user and sponsor created content. Considering that the site is produced by Powderhouse, which is behind a number of shows for the likes of Discovery Channel and TLC, the production quality of the content may be a cut above average (you can have a preview of the content at their Shoetube.tv Media Kit).

Unfortunately, the plans for user created content do seem like a bit of an afterthought. But, if people are into making videos about their shoes and themselves, this feature might work out just fine. Then again, most sites about shoes are about either about buying or some sort of how-to, so a “shoe channel” might be an interesting twist.

The site is slated to launch in February 2008, with a slew of professionally penned blogs, editorials on shoe trends, and “tons of other community features.” And since we love nothing more than community features, we can’t wait to see how ShoeTube.tv does them.

[via MediaPost Publications]
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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google, Social Software, web 2.0

A few weeks ago Google launched a new feature that makes Google Reader a bit more social. Whenever you mark an item as “Shared,” your Gmail/Google Talk contacts will be able to find that article by following a new “Friends’ shared items” link in Google Reader.

Now here’s the thing: Google Reader shared items have always been available to the public. But in order to find a shared item feed you need to enter a rather complicated string of characters in your web browser’s URL bar. The result is that you’re probably not going to find anyone’s shared items unless they give you a link. Some people have made their shared items available to the public buy putting a link on their blog. Robert Scoble is famously almost as proud of his “link blog,” as he is of his actual blog. But other readers assumed they had some level of privacy and only shared items with a handful of friends.

Now that anyone you’ve ever corresponded with over Google Talk can see your shared items, you might be a bit more careful of what you share. And some people aren’t particularly pleased with that situation.

Is the new Google Reader shared items feature an invasion of privacy? We’re going to go out on a limb here and say no. If you don’t want the whole world to see your shared items, there’s an easy answer: don’t click the share button. But we can imagine plenty of situations where you would want to share some stories with the whole world and other stories with just a select group of people. Or where you might want to be able to differentiate between “friends,” and family, colleagues or other people who might not find some of your shared items so amusing.

So while we don’t think Google necessarily did anything wrong by adding this feature, we don’t really understand why the feature is one size fits all. There’s no option for users to opt out of having their items shared other than to stop sharing items at all. And there’s no way to share your items with some friends, but not others.

What do you think? Is the new Google Reader friends’ shared items feature a privacy violation or just a poorly implemented attempt to make RSS reading a more social experience?

[via Scobleizer]
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Gimme more! Gimme more! Perhaps, you wanted more so I'll give you ten metasearch engines. Ah-hah, not just 5. Make it double!

Metasearch engines, which generate results from a multitude of search engines and directories, are pretty useful much of the time. Here are 10 worth exploring metasearch engines with their accompanying info:

1. Clusty - “Clusty queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking…But what really makes Clusty unique is what happens after you search. Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, our Search Engine groups similar results together into clusters.”
2. Dogpile - “Dogpile puts the power all the leading search engines together in one search box to deliver the best combined results. The process is more efficient and yields more relevant results.”
3. Excite - “We gather results from the top engines in the business, and compile them to give you the best possible results for your search. It's a pretty simple equation, and it means you get all the top results from the leading search engines on the Web.”
4. Info - is a metasearch engine that utilizes both major search engines and directories to drag its results from. The site presents the organic results on the left side and the sponsored results on the right.
5. Ixquick - “An Ixquick result is awarded one star for every Search Engine that chooses it as one of the ten best results for your search. So a five star result means that five search engines agreed on the result.”
6. Kartoo - The site is highly graphical, sporting results as a “map”. Hovering over any of the results then gives more info about that result in the upper left corner, overlaying the Topics list.
7. Mamma - “The search engines Mamma.com queries often return duplicate results. Instead of simply eliminating the duplicates as many metasearch engines may do, we use this information to rank our results. Each duplicate search result is considered a 'vote' for that result. Pages with the highest number of votes go at the top of our result set.”
8. Metacrawler - Using Infospace's engine, the site find the balance between commercial and non-commercial results.
9. Myriad - The site can put more weight on some engines than others. It then presents the output in several tabs.
10. Zuula - This is a metasearch engine that falls into the non-blended style, in which each engine's results are presented separately as tabs. But look for interesting features, you'll be fascinated.

Choose what metasearch engine fits you right.

See article.








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Instead of our regular articles, news and facts, we’ve decided to publish a Christmas crossword puzzle about Search Engine Optimization this week. Have fun!

Instead of our regular weekly articles, news and facts, we decided to publish a Christmas crossword puzzle about Search Engine Optimization this week. Have fun!

Filed under: Business, Social Software, web 2.0

With everyone and their cousin busy idea farming for the next monster Web 2.0 social media community site, there are going to be some oddities. And Product Clash, despite the “sounds good on paper” concept, is shaping up to be one of them.

The idea is this: you have a bunch of products like game consoles, cameras, or mp3 players and match them up against a similar product in a 1-on-1 “clash.” After registering for a Product Clash account, you can then vote for your favorite item of consumer merchandise by clicking on a link called “clash this!” You can also leave behind comments and blog about the clashes or click an affiliate link to order the item.

Right. But there are some obvious problems. For one, if the site is attempting to break into the comparison shopping niche by disguising itself as a social media site it’s in trouble because it isn’t any good at either. Besides a rundown of technical data, it has very little information on the products. That, and outlets for fanboys/girls of virtually any product are countless.

The Internet already saturated with resouces on consumer electronics, the future of Product Clash looks like a long uphill battle if not outright grim. Even though it is still in beta, a large problem remains: “clashing” products just isn’t very much, well, fun. And a glossy Web 2.0 interface is not going to help.

[via TechCrunch]
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Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0

Christmas Eve 2007 will live in infamy as the day social networking went too far for us. We woke up this morning, not to the sounds of Christmas music, or the sight of brightly wrapped presents under our tree but, to a press release from Pet Files, a social network for pets. Pet Files lets you build unlimited pet profile pages, publish unlimited photos and videos of your pets, along with several other features we find infinitely baffling.

We love our pets, don’t get us wrong, but unless Fluffy learns to type and masters the English language, Pet Files misses the mark for us. We burn far too much time on social networking sites promoting ourselves as it is. Even if everyone got together and slowed down the planet, adding several additional hours to the day which we could use to keep up with social networks, we’d be hard pressed to burn those extra hours in our day making e-friends on Fluffy’s behalf.

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Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Text, Productivity, Web services, P2P, Social Software, Search, web 2.0

Springnote is a powerful browser based note taking system. You can forget about the standard text only inputs that many online note tools offer, this application has the ability to drop in images, attach files and organize layout at will. Its wiki style note taking system allows pages of content like todo’s, monthly calendars and plans to be created with Word like functionality and tools with tags, change history, folder hierarchy and page bookmarks for more important content. Springnote’s can also be shared between friends for reading or collaboration.

Perhaps the most important feature of Springnote is the ability to import and export notes. Downloading options include HTML, XHTML and Send to a Blog or use anywhere else. Importing can be done using MS-word docs, .txt, HTML or OpenDocument .odt formats. Springnote has an open API and unlimited storage of text files with 2GB file storage available. There are tons of Springnote mashups that you can utilize to expand the functionality of your account, including IM, Flickr, and Firefox toolbar integration.
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Filed under: Internet, Social Software, Search

Exactly one year after Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales first announced plans to create a human powered Search Engine, Wikia Search has launched in private beta. There aren’t a ton of details to report right now, but Wales sent a letter to the Wikia Search email list on Sunday evening announcing the private beta, as well as plans for a January 7th public launch.

Last month Wales delivered a speech in South Africa where he showed off a few images of the new Search Engine. Those pictures looked suspiciously like a social networking web site, but it’s possible we were just looking at the personal profile pages for Wikia Search contributors.

The social search field has been heating up quite a bit recently. Mahalo, the human powered Search Engine created by Weblogs Inc co-founder Jason Calacanis has been up and running for a while now, and now both Wikia and Google are getting into the game. Either the competition will lead to greater innovation and the most useful search engines the world has ever seen, or potential contributors will be overwhelmed with choices that they’ll decide it’s easier not to bother submitting Links to any social search site at all when they can just turn to good old Lycos and AltaVista for their search needs. No, seriously, both of those search engines still exist.

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Filed under: Internet, Photo, Web services, Social Software

Myspace, which acquired photo-sharing powerhouse Photobucket back in May, now allows users to easily insert their Photobucket pictures into Myspace comments. To take advantage of this feature, just login to Myspace and attempt to comment on another user’s profile. When the comment box appears, enter your witty, extremely original comment, then click the “Add image from Photobucket” link. You’ll be prompted to login to Photobucket and select a picture to post with the comment.

If you don’t think your own photos are exciting enough, you can also use Photobucket’s “Find Stuff” search feature from within Myspace’s comment editor. This allows you to find totally cool animated icons, funny (while relevant) seasonal pictures, or pictures from other users’ albums.

As Mashable points out, for some reason Myspace doesn’t automatically log you in to Photobucket. At least the second login is inline and doesn’t require a new tab or window to go hunting for a picture URL.
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Filed under: Audio, Internet, Social Software, web 2.0

Who likes music by a wide variety of up and coming artists in many differing and unique genres? Who would like to be able to legally download that music to your computer and portable device? Who thought Spiderman 3 was the best of the trilogy?

If you answered in the affirmative to all three of those questions, we’re afraid there’s no hope for you, my friend. If you said yes to the above two, then read on!

Jamendo is one of the hottest places to legally download music, and they’ve just released a refreshed website. Updates include direct music downloads in http, more intuitive navigation, easier saving of tracks, albums, and playlists, and more.

All of the music on Jamendo is licensed by the Creative Commons license, meaning you can download, listen, burn, share, and talk about the songs as much as your heart desires. And though all the music is free, you can donate to the bands who have given you particular joy or satisfaction. Jamendo even shares 50% of its advertising revenue with artists who choose the “Revenue Sharing” program.

Jamendo also has a great community aspect; you can build customized playlists and share them with your friends and family.

Jamendo is currently running a contest in celebration of the release of their new version. The top 5 user playlists, as voted on by the users, will receive a free iPod Nano.

How sweet is that?

You can listen to free music, share what you like with your friends, and maybe win an iPod Nano. That’s not just having your cake and eating it too. That’s mixing the dough, putting it in the oven, frosting it, cutting it into pieces, and eating more than your fair share, all with a glass of ice cold milk.

So get cracking. Register for Jamendo if you haven’t already and broaden those horizons.
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SEO is all about practicing effective techniques as well as discovering new ones. This is the essence that every SEO company should always utilize when optimizing a website.

To guide you in optimizing I made a list of effective SEO techniques. If done right, they will give your site a timely boost.

1. Title Tag - one of the most vital parts of on-page SEO. It helps search engines determine what your site is all about. Good title tags help with user click-through rates when your site is listed in the Search Engine ranking pages.

2. Description Tag - describes what info is within a particular page of your site.

3. Headers - H1 tag at the start of a web content help reinforce keyword Optimization. If you have to use more headers, use H2, H3 and so on.

4. Names - In naming your website, use your keywords. You can either use hyphens or underscores.

5. Images - In naming your images, use the alt attribute. It will help search engines understand the contextual counterpart of the image.

6. Robots.txt File - Another SEO must have. This tells crawlers which folders or files they have access to crawl. So if you want to keep some details, preclude them using robots.txt.

7. Blogging and Social Networking - Create a buzz. And before you know it, the buzz has already become a sizzling issue in the industry. That equates to good SEO.

See article.








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Modern promotion gave birth to video marketing. There's no denying it; the medium is now of the leading channel to market a product or a service. Before, SEO gurus despise the idea of having videos displayed on web pages. But time changes…

Now, video marketing is a driving force within online marketing industry. Case in point, the medium is treated as one of the most successful ways to build a brand. This is why YouTube has become an excellent avenue for marketing.

Earlier, Comscore reported:

YouTube.com drove the lion's share of the video streaming activity at the Google Sites property, with 53.5 million unique streamers and 1.1 billion streams initiated. More than 126 million Americans viewed online streaming video in March.

The figures reflect one thing: that YouTube could create an impressive aftermath marketing-wise.

Also, statistics shows that 6 out of 10 consumers watch streaming video. Enough reason for us to focus on creating and marketing videos. Capturing 60% of your market base could be overwhelming!

See article.








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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

The first annual Open Web Awards voting season has officially drawn to a close. Yesterday we presented the Judge’s Choice winners. But we’ve long had a sinking suspicion that our readers are smarter than us, so we’ve been kind of curious to see what the results would be. And now we’re ready to share them with you.

While we wouldn’t be surprised to discover there may have been some ballot box stuffing in one or two categories, but this is a popularity contest, not a scientific poll. Overall we’re pretty impressed with the results.

The winners will be honored at an awards event on January 10th, 2008 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Mainstream and Large Social Networks

Netlog.com

Applications and Widgets

WidgetBucks

Social News and Social

Digg.com

Social Search

Facebook.com

Sports and Fitness

Sportme.org

Photo Sharing

Vois.com

Video Sharing

Kaltura

Start Pages

iGoogle

Places and Events

MySpace.com

Music

Pandora.com

Social Shopping

Zlio.com

Mobile

Google Maps for Mobile

Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks

Cafemom.com

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