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Archives for May 2009

Yahoo! 360 Closing Shop. How Confident Are You With Your Blogging Service Provider?

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Yahoo! has announced that its 360! service will be shutting down by July 12, 2009.

Though 360 gained a strong core of loyal users (you) who enjoyed the service, Yahoo! has been reprioritizing some products to help us deliver the best possible experiences to consumers. The decision to close Yahoo! 360 and transition users to profiles is part of this larger strategy, but we had been waiting until we had an alternative solution that we could offer to our community of Yahoo! 360 users until we officially shut down 360.

This might not exactly be big news to most of the world, but for regions where 360 is the preferred blogging and social networking application of choice, like in Vietnam, this could be cause for concern and headache. Yahoo! will provide a way to migrate blog content to a Yahoo! profile. But of course, it’s not the same thing. The functionality will likely be different. Also, if your blog has already been optimized on the search engines and saved on peoples’ bookmarks and RSS readers, you will definitely lose readership.

This makes me wonder: how sure are you with your service providers like blogging applications, lifestreaming services, and the like? Many of us rely on WordPress.com, Twitter.com and other free or paid hosted services to run our blogs, save our thoughts, and practically store our memories. Maybe the bigger, more popular companies don’t run the risk of folding up. But the smaller, niche service providers might be riskier. Does this mean everyone should just go with one service like everyone else? Or maybe it’s best to run a self-hosted blog.

Yahoo! 360 will not be missed, except perhaps in Vietnam. Maybe this is one big reason Yahoo! has decided (since 2007) to end support and ultimately pull the plug. It’s probably not cost-effective to maintain a big service when it’s only patronized in one niche or regional market. But then again, Yahoo! could have probably just focused its resources on that particular market, just like how other services like Friendster are doing. The only consolation of big users, at least, is that content can be migrated into a Yahoo! account, and this should likely be hassle-free.

Are your web apps future-proof? Or is there no such thing?

Via Blog Herald and @yahoo.

Domain names and self-hosted content still important in a Web 2.0 world

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Is the old mantra of having a dot com domain name for your business becoming less important as social media takes hold, or is it still a vital and centralised piece of branding that must simply evolve to keep pace with the changing nature of the Web?

Mashable published an interesting article this week titled Is Social Media Making Corporate Websites Irrelevant? in which it suggests the merits of directing people to a social networking URL instead of a corporate web site.

I can understand the lure of promoting more “sticky” sites, such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, over a staid corporate web site, particularly if the company has managed to create something viral or otherwise of enduring interest to users.

However, my general take on the issue is that it’s not wise to decentralise branding and content to third party sites that may either restrict access to members (Facebook) or could close down or suffer technical problems that subsequently offlines a big chunk of your marketing efforts.

Instead, create microsites using domain names that you own, pointing to content that you host. Yes, incorporate Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and whatever other social networking and media tools you see fit, but don’t rely on them outright.

If you want to direct people to Facebook, why not do it via a subdomain that you have control over. In any case, not many organisations have vanity Facebook accounts yet. What’s easier to remember: facebook.yourdomain.com or www.facebook.com/people/Your-Name/123456789 ?

Web 2.0 sites are certainly a lot more alluring than the average corporate site, but there’s no reason why companies can’t create (or outsource) their own compelling content that embraces the social web but doesn’t relinquish overall control.

What do you think?

What do you do with valid comments that have commercial links?

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You probably get these a lot of times. Some posts a valid comment, with well-thought out and substantial paragraphs. But when you check the author name and link, it’s a link to a commercial site, using keywords meant for search optimization. Some of these get caught by the spam filter, but some are approved. You tell yourself there’s no worry, because you use rel=nofollow anyway. But if your comment policy (if you have one) prohibits outright advertisements, your readers might start to wonder.

You probably get two to three paragraphs with good arguments, but signed as “buy used cars” or “bank loans” or whatnot. With a blog as big as Performancing, this can become a big headache.

What do you do with valid comments that have commercial links? You can either:

  1. Remove the URL, leaving out the name;
  2. Unpublish or delete the entire comment; or,
  3. Leave it be, making sure you have rel=nofollow turned on.

Deleting the entire comment is probably the easiest option, since it just involves one click. Editing out the URL is a bit more complicated, since it involves editing the comment and manually setting the URL field blank. Perhaps there should be an option or plugin on blogging platforms to nuke the URL field in one click, but leaving the contents intact.

And then there’s the question of your threshold for commercial links. What exactly does constitute a commercial link that you’d rather delete? What if the link were relevant to the post you made? For instance, if you post about viruses and malware, and someone from a known antivirus company posts a valid tip, with a link back to his site, what do you do?

Again, dealing with a couple of these would probably be easy, but if you are faced with dozens or hundreds per day, it can get tedious, and you want something automated. Most anti-spam plugins are either a go or no go, meaning you can get them to publish or kill a comment depending on certain characteristics. I’d like to see something like publish the comment but not the link.

Of course, you can just hide the contents of the URL field, but that would not be fair to valid comment posters and readers interested in checking out commenters’ sites.

What’s your general rule on these kind of comments?

4 Guidelines to Building Social Media Apps

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Truth is, there are no rules set in stone to building applications revolving around social media. What is true is that there are a lot of them sprouting from the hedges these days. Some of them are built as a content platform, while others are built to supplement existing platforms.

1. It should have the function of an aggregator. Blogs have RSS feeds. You can grab these feeds and have them displayed in an easy to use home page tool like Pageflakes. With the rise of social media, your blog’s home page no longer is the main landing page. With the advent of FriendFeed, Twitter hashtags and yes even something as simple as cross posting your latest post to other blogs and social networks you own, your content becomes ubiquitous over the Internet given the fact that each of your social platforms may cater to a different target market. Developers should be able to see the value in making their users content as ubiquitous as possible.

2. “Social” should be beyond adding friends, generated because of true interest in a particular community. In the old days of MySpace and Friendster, the benefits of adding friends were really limited to being able to see each other’s profile. Today, the concept of building a community goes beyond having a friends list. If you do a Google search for “Friendster,” your top results include free custom themes made by community members. In the realm of mobile tech, you have Apple, Android and Nokia building a platform allowing a community of developers to converge by providing SDK’s for their operating platforms. In Twitter, a community is built upon hash tags to promote specific topics and advocacy.

3. Content can be imported and exported easily. Apart from Blogspot and WordPress, one of the better blogging tools out there is

Filed Under: Social Media

What is your Twitter network profile?

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In any social network setup, an individual’s contacts would most likely fall under these categories:

  1. An existing (real-world) friend or business contact
  2. A new friend or business contact found through the social network
  3. A celebrity

Granted, that with #3, a lot of celebrities on Twitter get their millions of followers not just because of the interactivity, but mostly because a lot of us starstruck fans are just so interested in what goes on with the lives of the A-listers.

And so this brings me to ask. What’s the proportion of these people on your followed list?

Starting out, you most probably follow only people you know. Someone from class, work, or a friend might have invited you through email to join and to add his profile. And so it begins–your network gains in number. But then you read @replies or @mentions citing other people, and you add them. Or you get notifications that @someone has started following you and you follow back. And then you find out that @bigcelebrity is twittering, and so you follow his tweets.

How many of these people actually comprise your “followed” pie? By my estimates, my own friend list probably has the following:

  1. 60% people I knew in the first place, whether online or offline
  2. 30% people I’ve met through Twitter
  3. 10% celebrities

Of course, this is just a rough guesstimate, but I like to think of my Twittering activities in these proportions. A bulk for personal interaction with people I know (friend, family, colleague, pet), almost the same level for interacting with potential clients, business contacts, and generally people who might not really know me, but whom I find interesting (I’m a reclusive introvert after all). And the small starstruck part in my tries to check out what celebs (Internet, film, TV) are up to.

What does your friend “pie” look like?

Can Twitter be a good data mining tool?

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Twitter has evolved much from its humble beginnings as what was simply a microblogging service. As people’s needs grow, we often also find innovative applications for existing tools and services, and Twitter is no exception. For instance, when I saw my Twitter friends exchanging messages as if they were on a public chatroom, I was at first taken aback. But now it’s the norm. And the system even supports exchanges of messages outright, whether private or for public consumption.

There are still a lot of potentially big uses of Twitter. For instance, people have been attributing the trending topics (which are popular mentions of keywords and #hashtags) to discussions that are currently popular. And now there’s the proposal to use a different syntax to insert other metadata into your Tweets. Zembly founders Todd Fast and Jiri Kopsa have proposed this on TwitterData.org:

Twitter Data is a simple, open, semi-structured data representation format for embedding machine-readable, yet human-friendly, data in Twitter messages. This data can then be transmitted, received, and interpreted in real time to enable powerful new kinds of applications to be built on the Twitter platform.

Here is an example Twitter Data message:

I love the #twitterdata proposal! $vote +1

The variable $vote which is under the subject #twitterdata then gets an incremental addition of 1 point. The idea is to use Twitter as a vehicle for data, which can be mined using other applications (via Search or API).

By proposing an embedded data format, our goal is not to turn Twitter into a mere transport layer for machine-readable data, but instead to allow semi-structured data to be mixed fluidly with normal message content. To these ends, we have chosen a syntax that conceptually resembles the use of Twitter hashtags, albeit with different syntax and semantics, and which allows humans to interact with data in a reasonably normal way.

To see an example of this at work, twitterdata.org is displaying a widget that shows the “votes” cast for the idea, both affirmative and negative.

I think there is merit to the idea. Twitter itself doesn’t necessarily have to have this functionality built-in. But with the popularity of such a syntax, third party apps will more easily be able to mine raw data from tweets.

Do you think this is a good idea? Or is there already an existing mechanism for doing exactly this without the need for introducing a new syntax or format?

Scheduling Your Writing Time Based on Your Energy

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Recently, I posted about the ebbs and flow of energy during your day to day life (Blogging and Working: Productive Times, Days and Locations), and I wanted to highlight some more on that point by telling you to focus your writing efforts on your peak energy times. Things like feed reading, e-mail, topic research, and other activities should be relegated to times when you aren’t at your peak, so that when it is time for you to write, you have the creative energy required.

Far too many bloggers stick to posting in the evening, after supper, after playing with their kids, cleaning, and watching their favorite evening show. As we wind down to head to bed, it can be the worst time to try to put out thoughts together for a post that will push our blog forward towards the goals we have set for it.

Blogging as a hobby works fine, as long as you don’t want to make a career out of it. I’ve met far too many people that come up to me and ask why they aren’t making thousands of dollars every month, only to find out that they blog for two hours, right before bed, when they feel like they need caffeine to keep their eyes open.

How can you display energy and excitement in your articles, if you don’t feel energized and excited?

Once you’ve figured out when you are at your highest energy level, sit down, and start pushing out content. Enjoy your writing, give it time, focus, and passion, and you will reach your goals. If you relegate your blogging to the last bit of time and energy you have each day, then don’t be surprised if you don’t get anywhere with it.

Misleading Headlines: Do they work or do they hurt?

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As I was flicking through my RSS feeds yesterday, I came across the following headline:

“Steve Jobs Leaves Apple”

Huh? Wow… well I know I haven’t read that anywhere else, but could this be a scoop?

Naively, I clicked on the link to be greeted with this opening paragraph:

“Steve Jobs is leaving Apple — eventually. Whether because of health, age, or any other reason, key employees leave companies. It happens everyday. What distinguishes a great company from a just a good company is how they plan for this eventuality.”

Well, duh!

Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t impressed, particularly as for some reason the web site in question had decided not to publish an excerpt — let alone a full feed — for the article.

I can cope with less-than-scintillating prose so long as it’s related to the title and excerpt, but in my opinion this misleading headline was simply used to try and entice more visitors to the web site.

The thing is, I’m not convinced that a misled visitor is a happy one.

The article in question was about succession planning — something that I might have had a vague interest in but probably wouldn’t have clicked through to if I’d found it sitting in my feed reader.

Because it used a famous business leader who generates a lot of online buzz, particularly of late where his health is concerned, it potentially lured other readers in.

Are the articles at that web site well-written? In general it looks like a fairly professional outfit, so I’m guessing so.

However, does this little stunt make me want to subscribe to the RSS feed of that publication? No, not really.

No doubt the site will pop up again from time to time as I search for information, but it’s not on my list of favourite sites.

Perhaps I’m making too much of this, but I really don’t think creating deliberately misleading headlines is a good policy.

Controversial headlines: fine, so long as the article is on-topic and actually contentious.

Now, hand on heart, I can’t say that I’ve never published an article with a headline designed to lure visitors, but I hope that I haven’t deliberately tried to mislead people in order to get a few more click-throughs.

At the end of the day, the overall reputation of my site is more important than any short term gains gleaned from such tactics.

What do you think?