As I have mentioned before, I run idek.net, which is a url shortener. These are great for places where characters are at a premium. Some people have asked me how the url redirects work and how they affect SEO. This quick video gives a basic overview of 301 redirects which is what idek.net uses to get your from a short url to a long one.
Other Resources:
I have been working on http://idek.net for a little while now (it’s a url shortener with great stats, useful for twitter). It’s something I’ve been doing on the side because I love to create apps. Like many friends I have who are programmers I have had many side projects that never made it. So why did idek.net get launched?
Well, the answer is easy, I aimed small. I took a good bit of one cloudy weekend and wrote a useable app and launched it. Once it was live I slowly started adding to it. It now has most of the features of the competitors, and a few more great ones planned.
I was able to gain momentum and keep it by not taking on any huge tasks that would get stuck in the mud.
Don’t want to take my word for it? Here’s some one who went into a bit more detail on why shooting for attainable goals builds momentum.
Of course, if I could follow that philosophy more closely then I’d probably post here more often!
Google has just launched SearchWiki within their search results. This toolset allows users to alter the results that they receive from google. They can move results up or down, add new results, or even remove them from the results. You can also add comments to search results.
Now, I should make it clear that this does not affect page rank, or even the results that other people see when doing searches. However, other people who are logged into google can see, via the SearchWiki icons, what users are doing with results. This allows the SearchWiki community to function much like reddit or Digg.
We’ve always said that the best search engine is the one that understands what the individual user wants … SearchWiki really puts that in action: this is an even deeper level of customisation than we’ve offered before, because people know best what search results they are looking for.
Juergen Galler, director of product management at Google
This is a great step forward for google. Rather than entirely trying to mathematically determine optimal search results they are actually able to incorporate opinions from people who are doing the searches. So while this won’t have an affect on most googlers, it does allow them to start to harness the massive community of people out there who want to work together to find better results.
I can only hope that this is a start of something that will provide more power to the social networks of users who are depending on google every day. Moving google a bit more towards the digg/reddit model could help to make results more relevant and also drive more involvement. Of course reddit and digg are also gameable, often times political or underhanded forces take advantage of this to bias results on the front pages of these site. Google is no where near prepared to give their rankings or results over to the mob. This method does seem like a safe way to allow those crowds to have their say without jeopardizing Google’s standing as the best way to search. Learn more about Google SearchWiki:
Today I had the pleasure of listening to Peter Shankman (@skydiver) talk social media at the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association monthly luncheon. This was one of the best social media talks I’ve heard, as @DjWaldow pointed out, it was on par with @GaryVee.
I tried to take notes on his big points, I’m dumping them here with a little bit of formatting. My thoughts are in italics. Please feel free to ping me for clarification.
Talking about Where The Hell Is Matt (showed the video)- You forward this because you want to, not because he asked you to. You’re gonna go home and find it and send it to all of your friends. You’ll be 4 months late, and a bit of a loser, but that’s cool. I love this guy - he’s hilarious
In ‘96 people though the internet was AOL, people would say “I use AOL to DL pics of Pamela Anderson, how could you do something for business with that.
In order for something to become viral 10-15 years ago it had to be really good. You couldn’t just copy and paste it, you had to work to spread it on. this goes back to what I said, it’s about enabling
As a follow up to my previous article, Howto Twitter, I’ve written up a bit about the mass of applications that are now available as supplements to Twitter.
Follow this link to see the article:
There are, of course, too many to mention them all, but I have selected a few that I find the most useful, even on a day-to-day basis. For anyone getting started in Twitter, this list will help bring you up to speed a bit faster. For those who twitter everyday you may learn something new, and if not, let me know which apps I left out which should be listed here.
Gary Vaynerchuk recently posted a couple of videos giving first Britanny Spears, then Barack Obama a hard time for how they are managing their twitter accounts. As always Gary has some great points, this guy owns the social space.
I completely agree - if Barack or Britanny are trying to own the space.
But what if they are just trying to provide another avenue for info about what they are up to. Isn’t that was twitter was started for? “What are you doing?” is the question, right?
Everything has its purpose. I follow a few news feedcasting twitterers because I like to get the news updates sprinkled in there. I actually don’t want a relationship, just straight news. So sometimes, having that info in twitter form is useful.
NB: I hope that this doesn’t lead to an uptick of this type of twitter spam. But I think educating the non-spammers is more important.
Ok, I thought I’d write a new bloggeries about using social engineering to game twitter. Let’s start to covering some basics that many of you know. The best people to follow on twitter often have more followers than those they are following.
It’s basic economics, unless you’re a superstar like @WayneSutton or @GaryVee, you just can’t handle all the noise it generates. Even though reciprocation is the nice thing to do, I can understand when a big name doesn’t follow me. This leads to easily identifiable patterns, spammers are often following 1000s of people and have followers numbering in the 10s or low 100s. When I get followed by one of these chaps I quickly block them. Update:@EmailKarma pointed out that I should just go with d spam @spammer.
I pulled together a quick primer for twitter over the weekend. It all came from a few tweets that I saw @TheRab make for some new comers that were following him. I figured that a Twitter Howto was due.
Check out HowTo Twitter
Please feel free to drop me a comment with anything that you think it missing. This is meant to to be a primer, not a complete walk through of everything twitter.
A lot of people are trying to make use of twitter for their business. There is no doubt in my mind that it can work. But there are so many ways to get it wrong. Want a short list? fine.
I could keep going, but you get it. Well, how about a small non-tech business that is getting it right? There are plenty examples of that too. Here’s one I just saw in tweetdeck from @SixPlates. Here we are, 4:00 on thursday, if there is a time of the week that I need a beer, this is it.
It’s personal, it’s short, and it gets to the point. I wasn’t really thinking of grabbing a beer, but now all I can think of is a nice cold beer in my hand. This works.
Building on my last post, Chris Brogan just put up a guest post on mashable about building and managing your brand on the web - whether it’s personal or business. Definitely more comprehensive than mine. Definitely worth the read.
Remember, your brand is your responsibility, and it’s not going to happen on its own.
January 5th, 2009| 