Moved Permanently. I was wrong. Ok, I wasn't totally wrong, but partially off base. Several years ago I spoke at a blogging conference and inevitably Seth Godin was invoked in a question from the audience. It went something like this: "Seth Godin says you don't need a Website anymore if you have a blog—what do you think? " My answer essentially defended a well designed Website. I made a logical case that blogs didn't do a good enough job of providing a great first time experience to a user. On a personal level, it made no sense to keep a Website and blog up at the same time when the blog has all of my information, plus content and value and provides a reason for people to actually come back. Whitehouse.govWhitehouse.gov is probably one of the most elegant and functional non transactional site experiences I've come across in quite some time.
Barbarian groupThe barbarian group is probably my favorite agency Website to date. So, if I were asked the same question today—I might answer it a bit differently. Google vs. the Real-Time Web. Just how big a threat is the real-time web to Google? As Om has pointed out, real-time content marks a still-amorphous but important new phase of evolution in the web, allowing for the instantaneous discovery of newly added information. And Twitter and Facebook are emerging as an alternative to the traditional engine, which presents a big challenge to Google’s core business. As Larry Page admitted this week, the company finally gets that. It’s easy to imagine Google falling further behind in the real-time content game. Google’s search engine has thrived because PageRank uses democratic algorithms that tracked page links.
Simply put, it’s the difference between discovery and search, between the “Now Web” and the “Then Web.” I doubt Google will ever make a good coffee shop. Of course, Google is going to try to dominate this new terrain, just as it does in search. Such an ancillary role won’t satisfy Google for very long. Use Conversions To Generate More Conversions | How-To | Smashing. Your Weakest Links Might Just Become Your Strongest Chain | Mar. 2009: A year that's looming larger each day for social media. Or is it? Times are tough. Many people may be looking forward to four years of hope and change, but the realities of a slumping global economy are upon us today. As we conclude budgeting season - or some procrastinating companies are just beginning - social media undoubtedly has received more attention for integration than ever. Outlook Sender's Time Zone - free plugin for Outlook 2007/2. Sender's local time upon replying or opening a message Have you ever thought how nice it would be to open an Outlook message and know exactly what time zone the sender lives in and when the message was actually sent?
Then you could easily avoid awkward situations like writing "Good morning" when it is already late evening on the recipient's side. Try our Sender's Time Zone plug-in then. This tool will be a real helper for those who often converse with people in different countries. There's no need to calculate the current time of the sender in your head - once you open a message in Outlook or click to reply, Sender's Time Zone will display their local timestamp showing you: Local time of the sender Time difference between your location and the location of the sender How much time has passed since the message was sent.
No setting and no configuring is required This handy little plug-in for Outlook will take just a few minutes to install, you won't need to configure anything. Operating System. Make Your Google Analytics Data Public. What's New in WordPress 2.8? | Blog Oh Blog. Today, while browsing the WordPress website, I noticed that WordPress 2.8 Beta was available for testing. So, I decided to download it and give it a test run. Here is a list of major changes that make this release a bit different from the earlier versions. Manage your Tags A new sub-section has been added to the Posts section called “Post Tags” that contains all the tags that have been used so far in your blog. Just like categories, you can change the Tag name, Tag slug and also add description for your tags. Manage Themes Better When managing your themes earlier, you had to click on a particular theme’s screenshot and then activate or discard it from the enlarged theme preview screen.
Browse New Themes This cool addition in WordPress 2.8 will let you add new themes for your blog right from your admin section. Improved Widgets Section The best and most wanted change that’s been done in WordPress 2.8 is the revamp of the widgets section. Edit Individual Post Comments. It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) — Copy. Which Celebs Are the Most Engaging on Facebook? How IT Professionals Can Get B2B Word Of Mouth. In the B2B IT Services world, word of mouth and referenceability are incredibly important. Your clients are very educated, sophisticated and most of all… sceptical. They have a lot to protect, and they don’t want to take chances by being the first person to test your service.
Advertisements Your credibility in this market is largely dependent on who you know, and many could care less about your marketing materials. In this article, I’ve outlined some tactics that Web Designers, VARs and other Technology Providers can use to generate more low-cost referral business for their companies. 1. This one is the hardest, and often most socially awkward. And really, its the simplest and most honest way to generate consistent referrals. 2. If a customer voluntarily sends business your way for the first time, send them an inexpensive thank-you gift… maybe $10 or so in value. This is very effective because most companies will do the opposite. Please note that a reward is different than a bribe. 3. 4. OpenID’s Tipping Point. In the past week or so, two of the biggest perception problems preventing proliferation of OpenID as the de facto standard for decentralized identity on the Web have been addressed. The first perception problem is around the issue of usability.
I remember attending the Social Graph Foo Camp last year and chatting with a Yahoo! Employee about why they hadn’t become an Open ID relying party (i.e. enable people to login to Yahoo! Account with OpenIDs). The response was that they had concerns about the usability of OpenID causing reducing the number of successful log-ins given that it takes the user off the Yahoo!
Sign-in page to an often confusing and poorly designed page created by a third party. Last year’s launch and eventually success of Facebook Connect showed developers that it is possible to build a delegated identity workflow that isn’t as intimidating and counterproductive as the experience typically associated with delegated identity systems like OpenID. What Is Your Conversation Worth? | The Relationship Economy..... Currency by definition means a medium of value exchange. The origin of currency is the creation of a circulating medium of exchange based on a unit of account which quickly becomes a store of value. When we put social media intothe context of currency we can see “the creation of a circulating medium of exchange based on a unit of account which quickly becomes a store of value.“ The account is your conversations which are added to the largest copy machine in the universe, the web.
The “store of value” is the propagation, recognition and attraction to the masses which your conversation draws. Google’s engine ranks and stores said conversations accordingly. What Is The Capital Behind Your Currency? Bertrand Cesvet, Eric Alper, Tony Babinski write: What is Conversational Captial? : Today’s consumers are increasingly developing their own personal narratives, creating and recreating identities for themselves.
You’ve encountered the process many times. What say you? Untitled. Muki ???? - ???? ?????? The Astounding Evolution Towards Less In A "More Society&qu. No one pays much attention to anything these days. In August 1981, the world changed dramatically. The saying "I Want My MTV," was introduced, and even though musicians traditionally stood behind the music, now they were forced not only to put a face to it, as they would in concerts, but also on music videos, a visual representation of their songs. As music began to transcend its own media channel and enter into something completely new, there was a small but vocal outcry.
These short blasts of music video would kill everything we knew and loved about culture. The ushering in of the MTV era is often linked to discussions around how much shorter the attention span of teenagers was becoming. Kids could no longer listen to an entire album and just wanted a quick fix (with visuals to go along with it).
It would not be long before a 30-minute sitcom would be well beyond a teenager's grasp and replaced with a quarter dropped into an arcade video game. The evolution is astounding. By Mitch Joel. An expert's guide to YouTube | Webware. In the past, we've done Newbie's Guides for certain services, but we wanted to switch things up and really dig into a product's advanced features. Video-sharing site YouTube is the perfect service to start with because it's massively popular and incredibly simple to use, but also has a few powerful features that are tucked away. This guide is to help you learn how to use some of these advanced features and to serve as a simple reference page.
For the sake of simplicity, we're only covering searching, viewing, and sharing. We've skipped uploading since it's pretty straightforward and made simple with the service's recently launched multifile uploader . We're also not including any third-party downloading tools because that is against YouTube's terms of use and is already an official first-party feature on some content. Searching Using YouTube's search tool: YouTube's search engine works a lot like Google's. . Limit to words in the title. . Exclude a term. . Play the wildcard. Viewing Sharing. After Taking 3500 Point Olympic Dive, Web Says: First, it was Big Finance – AIG and company. Second it was Big Media – the NYTimes and friends.
Third, it was Big Auto – GM and gang. It’s quite plausible that the next victims will be Big Advertising – WPP et al. What’s the relation? -> Each of them has profited from heaping risk on their customers … when they should have been the ones taking risks. The Web learned this lesson starting in 2001 on to 2003: The Dot Com Bubble and Burst happened because: Dot-coms’ business plans stated: (i) Get lots of users (then aka “eyeballs”) (ii) Sell ads on a Cost-Per-1000-impressions (CPM) basisHumans don’t like interruption advertising – like CPM ads – and they ignored most of these CPM banner-adsThe measurably poor Return-On-Investment (ROI) led advertisers to stop buying these adsAs a result, the dot-coms’ business plans broke.
Since 2003, however, companies operating on the web learned the lesson of risk distribution. One company in particular learned the lesson and applied it thoroughly: Google. Oops, Twitter Does it Again | Stay N' Alive. Cool changes coming to Twitter Search | Webware. Correction: Santosh Jayaram's title at Google has been corrected. Twitter Search will become a lot more useful soon, the microblogging site's new vice president of operations said Wednesday night. Santosh Jayaram, who until recently was manager of search quality operations for Google, was on a panel I was moderating in the evening. During the panel and later in a one-on-one discussion, Jayaram confirmed that Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.
This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what's happening in real time on the Web and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people looking for very timely content. Twitter Search will also get a "reputation" ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. Jayaram did not say precisely how reputation will be calculated; he indicated that engineers are still figuring that out. Social Media Benchmarks: Realities and Myths - ClickZ. InShare0 Benchmarks to avoid and others to embrace. We've talked about the ROI for social marketing and the new metrics like social intensity that should be used to measure how modern consumers respond to advertising and marketing.
But many clients still ask about benchmarks. They ask, "What are good CTRs (define), CPCs (define), CPMs (define), etc. so I know how my programs stack up? " Well, there's good reason those benchmarks are hard to find. Lacking a reliable source, I ran my own analysis over the last three years and came up with many eye-opening results. Let's look at those benchmarks and observations, and also do some myth busting for advertisers and their agencies. Time on Site Is a Bad Metric Time on site is still often referred to as if it's a useful metric of a program's success. For example, if someone opens a page in a Web browser, then takes a 30-minute phone call before coming back to the page, that "time on site" is artificially higher. Search, Display, and Contextual Ads. Logic Emotion: Earning Trust In Streams = Attention Influence.
Several months ago I did some thinking around the notion of "paid and earned media". I wanted to continue that vein of thinking a bit, perhaps broaden it and provide some new context. Let's put marketing aside for a moment. Let's even put the social web aside. Before our obsession with "social media" existed, we had e-mail, which as imperfect as it is has become very relevant when we think about things such as attention, action and even influence. Not unlike Digg, Twitter, Salesforce, or even RSS feeds to name a few—e-mail acted as our original streams. Let's say you are a brand that someone trusts. Managing Multiple StreamsNow let's fast forward beyond e-mail (without excluding it).
Getting Access To Our StreamsThere are all kinds of ways people are trying to gain access to your "streams". Trust = Attention While "getting in the stream" may be doable from both technical if not clever means (PR firms know how to do this), trust is another story. Twitter Launches Enhanced New Follower E-mails - louisgray.com. By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Facebook/FriendFeed) It would appear that Twitter has launched a brand new format for their new follower notification E-mails they send out to users opting to be alerted to new followers. The e-mails are now in a prettier HTML format and include the new follower's name, Twitter username, and picture. They also include the number of updates, number of people they follow, and number of followers they have. While users aren't given the option to follow straight from the e-mail, you can block the user by clicking on a link in the e-mail. It would appear as though Twitter is now competing head-to-head to the recently sold business, Twimailer and another popular e-mail service, Topify.
Both services provide similar data, and, in addition, show recent Tweets and other related data to the user to help in deciding whether one should follow or not. The New Look for Twitter E-mail Notifications The Old Look for Twitter E-mail Notifications. How to create a Twitter-style alert with jQuery, CSS, and PHP / See Location of all your Facebook Friends on a Google Map. Google: We're good for journalism | Webware. Virtual Stalking - A Real World Problem for Social Media | danny. Googleplex in 200 Seconds. Women Prefer Blogs/Facebook To Twitter. It. Publications Twitter Just A Blip So Far 05/06/2009. CloneCloud: The Power of Cloud Computing Comes to Mobile Phones. The Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media. The Big Kindle Revealed (Liveblog) Communities and Collaboration. Google Testing New Service Features On Chrome First? 6 Useful FeedBurner Features that are Normally Ignored. Google's Sneaky Launch of Latitude's Location-Sharing.
Measuring Social Media Optimization - ClickZ. More tools and tricks for teachers. Facebook Upgrading. 101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress | Noupe.