The Whole Story

A comprehensive, in-depth list of blog-specific marketing strategies designed to drive traffic from search engines, referrals and brand building. Includes descriptions of how to implement each tactic and pitfalls to avoid.

Just a few items on the list include:

Choose the Right Blog Software, Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind, Participate at Related Forums & Blogs, Tag Your Content, Link Intelligently, Invite Guest Bloggers, Go Beyond Text in Your Posts, etc…

This article really goes into great depth on how to attract more attention to your blog, is easy to read and does a great job. Be sure to check out the article and see what you think. If you yourself are a blogger, take a few notes, i’ve seen so many blogs out there that just totally suck simply becuase the blogger in question maybe doesn’t really know how to convey his/her thoughts and ideas properly.

Hey Kids! It’s The Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator™ 

Bullshitr is by no means a fully fledged new service and doesn’t offer a great deal (it doesn’t even sound very serious) but quite funny and informative nonetheless for anybody interested in what didn’t happen and what we were promised still to this day has not arrived.

Areas of the Web 2.0 bubble which various companies and organisations promised us which we did not get:

• beta-test user-contributed feeds
• disintermediate podcasting ecologies
• beta-test AJAX-enabled communities
• enable undefined blogospheres
• post AJAX-enabled feeds
• engage user-centred web services
• remix user-centred communities
• syndicate rich-client communities
• integrate rss-capable blogospheres
• reinvent user-centred folksonomies
• design dynamic wikis
• much much more…

One line on the site that I really like is “Devise bullshit compliant products and services with the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator”. All you have to do is just click on a button and the site gives you a promise which in some way was not fulfilled and users still don’t have the ability to do.

Any University students currently studying Computer Science or other computing discipline im sure will be able to make good use of something like this. If you can’t be bothered studying late one night but sitting at your computer feeling the urge to write great software (some of the greatest software ever written has been by students), then take a look at some of the stuff in which we currently don’t have and start from there.

Enjoy!

In the ever popular craze of sharing your files amongst friends and family online, there has never been a shortage of online services to allow you to do just this, but none with the simplicity and flexibility of a new service called Famster.

Famster essentially is another file sharing site but what seperates it from the rest is the myriad of features and functionality it provides, and totally free by the way. The idea behind the service is protecting your shared files from prying eyes whilst making it easy to still share amongst family and friends..

“Famster is your family’s home on the Internet one complete website that is personalized to your family. It’s safe, secure and so much Famster fun!” - Famster homepage

This feature rich service is definately leaps and bounds in front of so many other services online these days. Just take a look at some of the features Famster provides:

Features such as blogging, calendar sharing, family tree’s, scrapbooking, etc make this site such a powerful family centric hub for everybody to connect to and see what everybody’s been up to, and photos people have uploaded.

Granted, anybody can use this free service, but it is more geared towards family’s & groups of people with family tree functionality for example.

If you are looking for somewhere online as a central hub for your family to keep everything together neatly organized, then don’t look past Famster. The service is still in beta, but will be full released very shortly and can still be used right now. Sign up today, check it out.

Google - Behind the screen is an Australian Dutch documentary which aired here in Australia the other week on SBS. It takes a look at how Google as a company was founded, what their inital goals were for the company and how they became the dominant search engine in use today.

The documentary goes for approx. 50mins and one part I found interesting was how Google handles its search queries and their well known (and effective) pagerank technology which looks at incoming links to a particular site, sees whether the site is popular or not, and the most popular (or useful) sites of a particular search query are listed at the top of the search results whilst others are further down.

“The interviews occasionally get uncomfortable when Googlers face the tougher questions (ie, “Why is your book scanning technology proprietary and only accessible to Google partners? What are the political and security implications of detailed photographs of all the Earth’s surface? Why should users trust Google?”). It seems that they’ve all memorized Google’s mission (say it with me now: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”) but get pretty tongue-tied and stutter things about “disruptive technology” and “software engineers just making the world a better place” otherwise.”

Source: lifehacker.com - Google - Behind the scenes

If you are interested in taking a look at this documentary you can download the full length clip here. From official sources, only Australian residents have had access to this documentary whilst the rest of the world is left in the dark until they get it, but anybody can download (or watch) it via the link above.

Enjoy, its a really interesting look at what Google are all about.

Recently the word “google” has been added to the popular American dictionary Merriam-Webster.

Google noun (pronounced goo-gol)

“to use the well-known search engine to look for information on the web”.

Apart from the word “google” in its noun form, it is now a common transitive verb being used more and more commonly “I think I’ll go google that!” or “Just google it”.

With it’s addition into mainstream vocabulary and dictionaries, has the word ‘google’ started to loose its meaning?

Since the search engine google has become so widely used amongst the hundreds of millions of internet users the word “google” seems to have cemented itself into popular vocabulary and culture. I feel the term ‘google’ is quickly becoming recognised as a pop culture term describing the act of searching all together, regardless of medium or platform.

Google’s success might very well come at a cost though. Sure, who wouldn’t love to have their company printed into dictionaries for all to see, but this “overexposure” if you will could start damaging the search engine and use of its own product name will quickly loose its impact and meaning.

To quote Google: “We also face risks associated with our trademarks. For example, there is a risk that the word ‘Google’ could become so commonly used that it becomes synonymous with the word ’search’. If this happens, we could lose protection for this trademark, which could result in other people using the word ‘Google’ to refer to their own products, thus diminishing our brand.”

source: The Age - From Google to just plain google

This is not the first time google has found its name appearing in dictionaries. According to sources from The Age newspaper (Melbourne, Australia), the term google has also been recognised and printed in the highly renouned Australian Macquarie Dictionary listed as a verb similarly to its entry appearing in Merriam-Webster “to google”.

Google has dominated the internet search market for such a long time now and whenever they appear to be doing it tough, they do seem to bounce back quite often. They are a resiliant company and having their name in many dictionaries across the globe I’m sure won’t hurt them too much.

It’s Google afterall!

As angry clients increasingly turn to the Internet to settle scores, companies, independent retailers and everyday wrongdoers are learning that consumers can have the last word — and often the last laugh. The Web has turned into a place where shame and humiliation are sometimes the strongest weapons in fighting scams and unfairness.

I have seen many instances in which people have used methods such as these to publicly shame a large company or organisation in an attempt for financial gain and/or simply to prove a point. The article “Angry Customers Use Web to Shame Firms” in the Washington Post takes a very interesting look at how people are getting away with this.

The article discusses how recently AOL got publicly slandered this past week by a customer regarding online broadcast services. You can check out the article with the above link, or follow the read more link below.

I’ve thought of an idea for an article which will be written for tomorrow’s post. I hope you guys like it, but in the meantime, check out this article and let me know what you think.

read more | digg story

Everybody loves to see their friend’s newest photos they’ve just taken on their latest holiday, sporting event, birthday or whatever the occasion. There’s just something fun and interesting about photo sharing online, not only with your friends and family, but with the whole world!

Popular online photo sharing site Flickr has been around for quite some time and in a way pioneered the concept of online photo sharing, storage and organisation. While they do offer free accounts to new users, they are limited in upload bandwidth, storage and photo collections (or sets) which their pro accounts offer unlimited.

I’m an avid amateur photographer myself, but recently I just haven’t had the time to take as many photographs as I would like to which personally cannot justify purchasing a pro account on flickr. So I found myself wondering, are there any (possibly) free alternative online photo sharing sites to flickr out there? I went to find out…

It’s actually quite hard finding totally free one’s, but free in a way. Here’s a list of great photo sharing sites which give you more upload capacity and bandwidth than a FREE Flickr account gives you:

• http://www.photosite.com/
• http://www.shutterfly.com/
• http://www.albumtown.com/
• http://www.fotolog.com/
• http://fotopic.net/
• http://www.ringo.com/

Each of these photo sharing sites does offer some kind of storage capacity which isn’t too bad. Averaging around ~250MB online storage which is nice for being free. These site’s don’t have many of the limitations on their free accounts as Flickr does on their’s.

Free accounts on Flickr these days have an upload bandwidth cap of 20MB per month, while these sites do not.

So if you’re into photography but don’t get out as much to take your photos, or just a casual snapper wanting to share that special moment, look no further than a few of these sites. They don’t have the same restrictions flickr has on ther free accounts and are still easy to use. Be sure to check them out, and start sharing your photos!

Felow blogger Tyler Walicek has recently written a really great article on his blog entitied “The MySpace Saga” which takes a look at where the site all started out, how it took shape, and an interesting look at the popular social networking site’s more shady background.

“I’ve always been fascinated with MySpace. It’s a writhing, twisted cesspool of Internet slang and <FONT COLOR=#FF751A”>terrible code.<F/ONT> But it’s also an outlet for millions of people, mostly teens, who, someway, somehow, through all the malformed CSS and hideous pages, are creating an identity for themselves. They decorate their profiles with YouTube Clips, oversized text, and pictures of their favorite rappers. Their pages are 5000 pixels wide and impossible to read. And they love it.

But there’s more to MySpace than just users with questionable web design skills. The site itself has something of a shady history. With a little bit of research, I’ve managed to piece together a timeline for how the site actually came about.”

source: Tyler Walicek: The MySpace Saga

A look at who is behind the creation of the site, who exactly Tom Anderson is (myspace go-ers all know who “Tom” is right lol) and who is backing the site now.

More recently Rupert Murdoch and his company newscorp bought out myspace from its previous owners for something like $570 million dollars. Google was in the running for the buy out, but declined stating that they (google) weren’t interested in a buy-out of MySpace becuase they could create something better (paraphrase).

Rupert Murdoch is obviously fairly happy with himself these days after purchasing MySpace anyway. He know owns the most popular social networking site around, and perhaps the most popular website on the internet these days.

Definately be sure to check out Tyler’s article with the link above. Very interesting look.

Digg 3.0 was launched monday and boy is it one big update. Kevin Rose (digg founder) said that this latest version of the popular social news bookmarking site digg.com was going to be big, with a bevy of new features such as the highly anticipated concept amongst many ‘digger’s’ is the new Digg Topics, and boy was he right!

Digg has traditionally been in the past a technology oriented site appealing to the ‘geek’ croud mostly, but recently just before this release of Digg 3.0 it had become apparent that many diggers (including myself) were posting links to news stories that were perhaps technology unrelated. This was looked at by Digg and they have definately come up with the perfect solution. Make digg appealling to a wider audience and include topic areas such as politics, world and business, videos, entertainment and science, just to name a few.
For those of you who may not be aware of what exactly digg is, and what it’s all about, here’s the rundown:

Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that’s important to you!

source: digg.com

Some people already have started critizing the new digg design but personally I love it. They have incorporated the new topics so seamlessly within the digg layout we have all grown to love so well over the last yr or so, and once you’re logged in, the site really feels much more ‘personalized’ and all about you, the user. Your information is easily accessible, your dugg stories, your friends and your comments are all easy to access and using the site overall has greately improved in my opinion.

If you’re new to the digg community or even just never heard of it before, check it out its really cool. If you frequently visit alot of news sites, you’ll love this. People from all over the world find the most popular news stories and post them on digg so the most up to date and exciting news is always avaliable to you, whenever you need it!