Webdesign, CSS, Social Media, Tech & Geek Stuff » web 2.0

Social Media Sites (an update)

mr-mojo-risin — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:20:38 +0000

Here’s an attempt to build up a little list of the most important social media sites.

As it is far from being complete, it will be expanded from time to time…

Social marketing ebooks (free download)

mr-mojo-risin — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:11:54 +0000

Looking for informations, advices, strategies or hints guiding you on your paths through the social media djungle?
Here you’ll find a composition of free ebooks that might be helpful on your efforts to successfully use social marketing mechanisms for building a brand, attract traffic or gain significance on a certain topic.

So these Links will keep you busy for a while…

Instructions and sum ups

The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
Brian Solis about new tools and philosophies, how to effectively listen and engage with customers and in turn, cultivate a more significant community, enhance your brand and build relationships.

Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points
Social Media expert Chris Brogan gives you starting points how to inroduce your organization into social media and social networking

What is Social Media?
“a short, sweet summary of the phenomenon called social media”

The Essential Guide to Social Media
A sum up of some essential guidelines, written by Brian Solis

The Art and Science of Social Media and Community Relations
Interesting example of a company entering the realm of social media communities

Social Media Marketing Kit
Tips and tricks for the survival in the social mediasphere, plus a video Webinar

The Zen of Blogging
Really amusing story about a guys efforts to dive into the higher spheres of blogging – with a slight wink of an eye

Learning Web 2.0
Examples of ways in which associations are using new web 2.0 technologies and what possibilities they
may represent for your organization’s professional development

A Primer in Social Media
Advices for approaching social media with their new paradigms and, rules and philosophies

Studies

Blogs & Social Media
This article reports on a three-year-long international survey of public relations
practitioners examining the impact blogs and other social media are having on public
relations practice.

Social Web Analytics
This ebook gives a brief overview of the characteristics of the Social
Web, also known as Social Media.

Research-Based Webdesign & Usabilty Guidelines

Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media
Attempt to propose a new way of calculating an individuals online influence beyond the “traditional” method of analysing a blog’s inbound links to incorporate other social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO for WordPress blogs
How to use WordPress to ensure success for your weblog in the Organic Search Engine Results.

Google Adwords Secrets
Tips for keyword research, choosing a domain name, placing keywords, link building, effectively using SEO tools

We Have a Website. Now What?
This ebook provides straightforward advice for entrepreneurs new to search engine optimization.

Marketing

Get Viral Get Visitors
Trying to give and understanding of what viral marketing is about and how methods of successful campaigns can be adopted

The New Rules of Viral Marketing
Whatever you call it—viral, buzz, word-of-mouse, or word-of-blog marketing—having other people tell your story drives action. An example how it’s done…

Marketing With Case Studies
How to Sell Your Products or Services Using Story-Telling Techniques

Twitter for Business
A compact and dense round up how to use twitter.com to promote your company successfully

Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter
If you use the site properly you can build up another stream of traffic to your website or blog, not to mention developing a brand for yourself as well.

New_Rules_Of_Business_Blogs
How business owners and managers should act in blogosphere if they want to explore this new communication channel.

Masters of Marketing
Cleaning up some hypes and myths of internet marketing and giveing ideas for using social media mechanisms

Podcast Marketing eBook
This guide is intended only to give you a broad overview of some of the basics of podcast marketing.

Effective Internet Presence
How to build up a significant and productive internet identity

How to Write a Marketing Plan
A marketing plan guides a company step-by-step how to market its product or service to a specific target market and it helps a company remain focused on its marketing objectives.

Free-to-use Social Media Icon set

mr-mojo-risin — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:13:02 +0000

I searched for free to use web 2.0 icons of social media sites, but I did not find anything nice except some stock icons.

So I’ve made my own ones and I like to share them with you!

Feel free to use, modify and integrate them on your blog or website.
There is no need to link back, if you’d like to do so anyway, it is appreciated.

UPDATE:

I made a new icon set, you can download it here.

Here’s the download for all icons and logos and the .psd containing templates for 256×256 pixel buttons:

social-media-icons

Free Social Media Icons (PSD)

Have fun folks!

Social Media Study

mr-mojo-risin — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:54:08 +0000

Interesting study about the usage and the behaviour of social media platform users from over 29 countries from webguild.org:

A new study by Universal McCann called When did we start trusting strangers? found that rather than being passive, consumers have taken not only active, but also creative roles in consumerism. In fact, consumers have become true “consum’actors.” The study was base on 17,000 Internet users from 29 countries.

The study describes a “new influencer landscape” which is characterized by three significant trends: the rise in social media, the importance of digital friends, and the proliferation of influencer channels. The study also mentions the impact of this phenomenon: an influence economy, the democratization of influence, and the new“super influencer.”

Download the whole study as .pdf file here

Social media sites

mr-mojo-risin — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:22:05 +0000

News aggregators:

friendfeed.com
Friendfeed works as a feed of your social community activities, one adds services like flickr, picasa, twitter, google reader, digg, stumbleupon, del.icio.us, youtube, fast.fm and of course own blogs sharing the own post/messages/links with other people and commenting the interesting stuff from others. Seriously good source of hot news right from the streets!

toluu.com
A service to share and tag rss feeds and to find people of the same interest.
Quite new, one still needs an invite code – if you need one drop me a message.

delicious.com
Social bookmarking site, which recently launched a new, fresh layout, for sharing, tagging links, creating networks with friends/users of the same interest.

digg.com
Vote for news links, pictures or videos of your interest and help creating the famous digg effect, a self-made DOS attack on your website, if you’re lucky, you (or your server) must be prepared. Lately rumors said that alpha user take money for pushing news to the frontpage, other users claim to banned from Google Adsense due to the unexpected and sudden traffic created by the digg community.

Create your own community:

Ning.com
This is a platform where one can set up his very own community about any interest, offering video and photo uploads, discussion rooms, messaging, comments, fully editible profiles…
All a fully grown up community needs, so if one already gather a larger group of the same interest, this is a fine service to establish a exchange of thoughts and opinions.

Blog Communities:

Blogcatalog.com
Create groups for your own blogs and gather followers to promote events or interesting posts. Start or join groups for gaining from the strenght of the community. Interact via private messages and so called broadcasts you might send to your follwers. It’s got the social activity componet, too so one is able to see what fellow other bloggers are interested. Providing a widget showing the fans of your blog. A good, thus active and helpful member, might derive traffic from here.

mybloglog.com
Yahoo’s mybloglog is pretty similar to blogcatalog, but offering much more service to integrate, plus detailed statistics for your blog for one week or more is one chooses the paid version.

fuelmyblog.com
Voting site, if a blog gathers enough votes to reach the home page, one should better be prepared for a shitload of traffic.

blogflux.com
Blog Directory offering several paid services, like featured listing in a toplist and stuff.

Photo Communities:

flickr.com
Very large photo community with free restricted accounts and Premium accounts for 25$ a year. Yahoo.com scared off some users by forcing them to quit or to get a Yahoo ID and after that enabling videos for upload. But the community is still alive and kickin! Lately they set up a deal with Getty Images so in the future users might be able to sell their flickr pics via Getty Images, which could be interesting.

Related:
picasa.com
devianart.com

cuil.com – a new threat for the google empire?

mr-mojo-risin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:02:40 +0000

There is someone new in the search engine shark pool: cuil.com.

They do not start silently, they know who is the enemy and the attack is declared:

cuil.com [Cuil means knowledge in Irish] claims to search 121,617,892,992 web pages, which is “three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft”.

About their search method cuil.com unveils the following concept, which is not really that innovative as it sounds:

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

According personal data protection, cuil wants to inncocent and says not to intend to collect data from it’s users. A noble plan. indeed, but google wanted to do no evil, too and now is bowing to China’s censorship restrictions. We’ll see…

Cuil.com is offering several new features, like quick link icon in the search term suggestions, roll over descriptions, suggestions to clarify your search that come in tabs and categorized terms related to your search.

The staff from cuil might still hold some aces in behind, with some of them haveing worked at google themselves.
All in all cuil.com comes lean, fast and a nice look featuring some good and promising ideas.
On the other hand lacking some evident features like a country/language restricted search.
Let’s see how they get started and manage to conquer the hearts and the approvement of the internet usership.

Good luck cuil.com!

Twitter vs Friendfeed

mr-mojo-risin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:25:00 +0000

The discussion whether the one is killing the other is getting hotter and the opinions are raging high.
First of all these two “opponents” are hard to compare as friendfeed being a information aggregation tool and twitter a hybrid between instant messenger and micro blogging device.

Both serve certainly completely different needs, twitter mainly focuses on spreading rather personal opinons/feelings/emotional states/gossip, only randomly establishing a real conversation.
Friendfeed resembles a honey pot of information gathered by its user acting as honey bees collected from various flowers, like Digg, GoogleReader, del.icio.us, stumbleupon and many more.

Definitely the value of information might be varying, but like on twitter it users can adjust that by choosing their subscriptions.

Looking at the user stats both are steadily growing with twitter being comfortable in in the lead.
One of the reasons for this distance is certainly twitter started in August 2006 and friendfeed in October 2007. Another cause might be twitter is used for communication, friendfeed on the contrary deals in information. This shows why the geek ratio on friendfeed is definitely higher…

As a result both services will mostly not bother each other in the future, with their target audience being to different and having unequal demands.
So Twitter vs Plurk or Friendfeed vs GoogleReader would give much more challenging and interesting fights…

40+ Tipps and Tricks for WordPress

mr-mojo-risin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:18:26 +0000

The guys at hongkiat.com offer a really neat list of diverse plugins, widgets and tricks helping you letting your blog to stand out of the crowd with stunning features one won’t find on the average blog.
Even advanced wordpress users might find a new feature, so check it out:

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/40-most-wanted-wordpress-tricks-and-hacks

Webdesign, CSS, Social Media, Tech & Geek Stuff » web 2.0

Social Media Sites (an update)

Blogging

Photo Communities

Bookmarks

News Aggregators

Status

Music

Comments

Video

Books

Friendship

Miscellaneous

Career

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