In my early days I played a bit more in the darker side of the game. I fully admit that I built and ran more than 1 or 2 scrapers, aggregators, and MFA style sites, but as a business model those type of sites are really on the decline, and not something I’d ever recommend [...]
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CNN is reporting that Student James Karl Buck twittered his way out of jail with single-word text messages after being arrested. The "twit" (messages) communicated to his "tweeple" (friends) on micro blogging platform "Twitter," resulted in pals hiring a lawyer. Buck twittered all during the experience, the transcript of which is visible here. This is yet another case study speaking to the societal power of modern networking tools.
There is a lot of passion regarding Twitter in the search marketing community, with top SEOs/social media pros like Lee Odden and DoshDosh having dozens or even hundreds of "followers."
Respected link builder Jennifer Laycock has written extensively regarding applications of the platform. Others use Twitter (on their computer and/or phone) to stay in constant touch with family, customers and friends throughout each day. Twitter deployed recently in Japan with advertising in an attempt to leverage the channel. Stay tuned...
Other Twitter Resources:
The Many Uses of Twitter
techipedia
Twitter: Different Ways to Use Twitter
Lifehacker
200+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter
Marketing Pilgrim
51 Favorite SU, Sphinn, Twitter & Facebook Posts of 2007
SocialDesire
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Yahoo's generally solid quarter yesterday helps make the case that the company is worth more than the current value of Microsoft's bid. In advance of the earnings call yesterday, however, Steve Ballmer said that the company was not prepared to offer any more than what it already had put on the table. Now today, in the wake of Yahoo's earnings, he says he's "prepared to move forward alone, without Yahoo."
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For some time now I have been speaking and writing about ways of speed searching and search switching. Somehow, I've neglected to add the links to my site. So I'm fixing that tonight, before my presentation on Wed. at CIL 2008. The new Search Switching page includes sections for Search Switching Between Web Search Engines, Geographic Search Switching, Book Search Switching, and other options including another link to my Bookmarklets page (with its search transfer bookmarklets).
See also my article, "Speed Searching," in the March 2008 issue of Online (available for fee at ITI's InfoCentral or free from many library databases such as AccessMyLibrary) and my article, "Switching Your Search Engines," from the May 2007 issue of Online (available from many library databases including AccessMyLibrary).
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If the popularity of Facebook fansites was an indicator of how Londoners will vote on May 1st then Boris would be a clear winner with 7466 supporters whilst Ken and Brian trail behind with 2152 and 2130 respectively. Thankfully it seems that Londoners will vote with their feet rather than faces but latest results from a social media study reveal that online PR strategies could count for something in the electoral race.
Nielsen Online revealed today that London Mayoral candidates Ken and Boris are top of the blogs, dominating 80% of the social media conversation. Liberal Democratic candidate Brian Paddick is third with 9% of comments, followed by the Green Party??s Sian Berry with just under 4% and the BNP??s Richard Barnbrook with 2%.
According to Alex Burmaster, Internet Analyst from Nielsen Online, Londoners penchant for social networking continues to thrive and users are taking their opinions mainly to non-political forums, blogs & message boards including those of national newspapers and sites like Twitter and Facebook.
???Ken and Boris are the two leading candidates, neck and neck in the polls and the levels of conversation in the social media space utterly reflect this. If conversation levels were a guide, Ken would narrowly pip Boris to win. However, it??s when we look at the sentiment of these conversations that a far more interesting and revealing picture emerges.???
Controversy, positivity, negativity: sentiment towards the five leading candidates in social media
??? Controversy: Boris is the ???marmite?? candidate ?? being the most likely of the top five to generate some form of opinion either way. Only 30% of posts relating to him were of ???no opinion??
The Green Party??s Sian Berry generates the least controversy / most apathy ?? having the highest percentage (54%) of ???no opinion?? posts
??? Positivity: Whilst Boris is most likely to generate positive sentiment, 29% of posts being ???positive?? ?? Sian Berry had the highest overall ???net?? positive score of 15% (positive sentiment % minus negative sentiment %). Brian Paddick is the only other candidate to come out with a ???net?? positive score (11%)
??? Negativity: Richard Barnbrook is most likely to generate negative sentiment, 38% of posts being ???negative??. He also had the lowest overall ???net?? positive score of -19%
Indeed Nielsen's results seem to suggest that, shock horror, actually participating in blogs, forums and social media is effective in helping other people to form opinions on issues that affect them. The most active candidates online garnered a net positive score in total comments posted on social media sites. Brian Paddick employed a web ace, signed up to twitter, where he hosted a policy debate and also broadcasted himself via uStream.tv.
???Of the three leading candidates in the polls it??s not surprising that Brian Paddick is the only one to have an overall positive sentiment score in social media. His campaign, involving a US web strategist firm, has focused the most heavily on social media including a pioneering British political use of sites like Twitter, Facebook and UStream.TV ?? and it certainly seems to have paid dividends.However, judging from the sheer levels of social media conversation on the election, it may not be enough to grab victory over Boris or Ken. If social media were a crystal ball it might tell us Boris is likely to get more votes than Ken. However, positive comments on Boris more often centre on personality rather than policies and only time will tell if this is a strong enough factor for voters when faced with putting the cross in his box to change the status quo.???
So, positivity is not the cure for apathy and clearly Londoners like myself, vis-a-vis this post, whether online or on the underground, don??t know what we really really want but we sure do love a good rant!
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While video content continues to skyrocket, people still don't rely on video search. Over half of people, in a recent ClipBlast! survey, said they find videos through their own exploration (53%) or recommendations from others (52%).
However, a sizeable amount (40%) searched for specific videos. What's surprising are the differences based on sex, as 45% of males searched while 35% of females did so.
There was a racial divide reported too: nearly 60% of non-Whites and 35% of Whites reported search activity. It's hard to say why there's such a spread, even accounting for survey size.
Click to read the rest of this post...
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One of the technical issues that can cause problems with a search engine crawling a site to index its pages is when the content of pages on that site appears more than once on the site at different URLs (Unique resource locators, or web page addresses). Unfortunately, this problem happens more frequently than it should.A [...]
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