Robert Scoble is a one of the thought leaders and innovators on the web today.  He is a smart, engaging guy who gets around to listen and exchange ideas with many of the other web leaders. Scoble’s a great favorite of mine and when he speaks, I listen.  And so do a lot of other people.

On his blog today ,Scobleizer — Exploring the 2010 Web Scoble talks about going back to basics and refocusing on his blog. He talks about what some have called his obsession with Twitter and Facebook, where he has, in fact, been a major player. Scoble explains this by saying “All my fun experiments were over on Twitter, Facebook, or friendfeed. You could see that. Mike Arrington even tried to do a friendfeed intervention last December.”  So now, Scoble is trying to bring that sense of fun, experimentation and real time zest into his newly re-invented blog.  He is also trying to show the rest of us now to do the same, in real time.

(About a week ago I posted From The Mouth of A Guru: Why You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet which has many of the same caveats about the value of focusing your work on your own blog and letting Twitter be your outpost.)

In that vein Scoble lays out what he thinks the future of the web will look like:

“1. It’s real time. Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed are all moving toward architectures and displays that refresh in real time, or let you see what’s happening right now. We are at the extreme beginnings of that trend. You really should watch the video of the panel discussion I moderated on the state of real time search to get a sense of where this is going. That panel discussion will be remembered for years as a key point. One of the panel members runs Facebook search team. Yes, Facebook is working on real time search. (That video is in two parts since the meeting ran almost two hours long. I really do recommend watching it. Part I is here. Part II is here.).
2. It’s mobile. You’ll see this more next week when the Where 2.0 conference rolls into town, but if 40,000 iPhone apps hasn’t convinced you yet, nothing will. On Monday I’m meeting with Nokia to find out the latest.
3. It’s decentralized. Look at my behaviors. I’m all over the place. Six years ago I did only one thing: blog. Now I Flickr. YouTube. Seesmic. Friendfeed. Facebook. Twitter. And many more. Go to Retaggr and see all the places I’m at.
4. Pages now built out of premade blocks. You build these pages by copying a line of Javascript code to your template. This is very simple once you see how to do it, but for someone who doesn’t know code, or where in the template to go, this is VERY daunting. Silicon Valley has NOT made it simple enough yet for the mainstream to build highly useful pages. See the friendfeed block to the right of my words? I added that by copying and pasting from the friendfeed widget page. If you know where to look a TON of cool pre-built blocks like this are available for you to put on your website or blog.
5. It’s social. This seems obvious to anyone on Twitter or Facebook, but how many businesses add their customers to their pages? Not many. Silicon Valley has done a horrible job so far of explaining why adding people to your websites matters.
6. It’s smart. We’re seeing more and more smarts added to the web every day. Tonight Wolfram’s new search engine turned on. Have you played with it? That’s the 2010 web and check out what you can do with it.
7. Hybrid infrastructure. When I visited 12seconds.tv in Santa Cruz they told me they were using a hybrid approach: they own a rack of servers but they also use Amazon’s S3 to “cloud burst” or take up the slack for files that are popular…

PR People: I even made a place you can pitch me on 2010 web ideas. It’s interesting that a bunch of people are subscribed to that room — probably lots of tech bloggers looking for ideas.”

I put in that last link so those of you who are bloggers could go fishing there for ideas.

I’m certainly going to watching the evolution of Scobles newlly updated blog and trying some of the same tools and strategies myself.  Are you?  If you do, please leave a comment and tell us what works for you and what doesn’t.  We all in this giant web conversation together, now that Web 3.o and the interconnections of social media and dynamic linking have arrived

Tags: facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, Robert Scoble, Seesmic, Twitter, YouTube

If you happen to be an entrepreneur on the web, like me, whether you’re
building your own blogs and websites or building them for others, you need to keep your eye on the web’s future. That’s where we’ll be competing for eyeballs, relevance and revenue.

Some distilled insight is offered by Richard MacManus in Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web. He analyzes and sets out to distill “a fascinating 3-part series of posts this week by Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures. The series aimed to tie together 3 big trends, all based around structured data: 1) the still nascent “Web 3.0″ concept, 2) the relatively new kid on the structured Web block, Linked Data, and 3) the long-running saga that is the Semantic Web.”

It might be a tall order to understand all of that in one gulp, but let’s look for a second at Web 3.0, then gently peek over the horizon to see a tiny preview of what lies ahead. ( Some of it might be a little techie, but for most of us it will work behind the scenes, and we will have simple tools which help us take advantage of the Net’s increasingly intelligent structural and linking dynamics.)

“Web 3.0: What Comes After 2.0 (!)

Last year Greg Boutin loosely defined web 3.0 as “the Web of Openness. A web that breaks the old siloes, links everyone everything everywhere, and makes the whole thing potentially smarter.”

There is a lot of debate about what Web 3.0 is and the term itself is open to derision. In my view Web 3.0 is an unoriginal name for the next evolution of the Web. What’s important to note though, is that there is a difference in the products we’re seeing in 2009 compared to the ones we saw at the height of ‘Web 2.0‘ (2005-08). If Web 2.0 was about user generated content and social applications such as YouTube and Wikipedia, then Web 3.0 is about open and more structured data – which essentially makes the Web more ‘intelligent’.

The smarter the data, the more things we can do with it. The current trends we’re seeing today – filtering content, real-time data, personalization – are evidence that ‘Web 3.0′ is upon us, if not well defined yet. We actually saw a great example of Web 3.0 this week, with Google’s release of Search Options and Rich Snippets. Those features added real-time search, structured data, and more to Google’s core search.”

Macmanus goes on to discus “linked data” which is interesting, if pretty techie.  There is a fascinating, if mind blowing, graphic of a Linking Open Data (LOD) project.  He also notes that Google will be a big player in all of this.

The bottom line is that, ultimately, we will have a more intelligent web and entreneurs would do well, to position themselves for the future by keeping an eye on linkages.  To  dive into the complexity of it all, go to Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web – ReadWriteWeb.

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Tags: Google, Greg Boutin, Linked Data, Linking Open Data, Semantic Web, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, YouTube

I have discovered Adam Singer, and I’m glad I did.  I like the way he thinks.  Self described as a PR/marketing director, blogger, electronic music producer, tech geek, Adam writes at TheFutureBuzz.com.

In 19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet,  Adam gives his thoughts of this subject which I found to ring true.  It certainly puts in perspective how much time and effort one should be devoting to which activities, Tweeting or Blogging?  Here’s what Adam has to say on the subject and his first 4 reasons:

“Here’s why you should make a blog your home base and consider Twitter an outpost:

1.  Blogging demonstrates true commitment and passion to your industry that you really can’t fake long-term.  Most won’t be able to sustain it over long periods of time with frequency, but those who do so are rewarded in spades and stand out from the crowd.

2.  Old articles are valuable and still read years later, given infinite life by the engines.  Old Tweets live in archive purgatory where a majority will never be seen again.

3.  Remember, you’re essentially contributing to someone else’s network on Twitter – certainly there are returns, but make no mistake they profit from your attention.  I know you might not have a problem with that because you gain something too, but it’s good to be conscious of that fact.

4.  A compelling link in a blog entry will be clicked; links in Twitter are noise that in aggregate make up signal, but the reality is links in your stream aren’t the same as a post with a compelling link.”

For more, read the whole post at 19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet.

And let me know what you think.  Tweet? Or Blog?  And what’s the right mix?

Tags: adam singer, blog, Online Communities, social networking, Twitter

As competition heats up in this tough economy, one way to beat your online competitors is to go local. Even hyper-local.

Fortunately Twitter has the tools to let you do that.  Of course, you are using Twitter to build your brand and develop your relationships with other Tweeple, so you don’t want to overdo it.  But, if you have a product or service to sell, it’s helpful to remind your neighbors what it is.  For example, if you’re selling fresh baked bread, other Twitterers in your ‘hood are not likely to be getting that from Seattle or Chicago, unless they live there. So, your first step is to identify local Twitter users so you can reach out to them

Identifying Local Twitter Users

If you’re interested in local twitterers and happenings, 50 Useful Twitter Tools for Writers and Researchers lists these tools which will help connect you with nearby potential customers and you keep up to date with the local scene:

1. Nearby Tweets: Check out Nearby Tweets to seek out local Twitter users.
2. Atlas: Use Atlas to see tweets on a map.
3. GeoFollow: Using the GeoFollow directory, you’ll be able to find users in specific areas.
4. CityTweets: See real time Twitter activity for cities on CityTweets.
5. Twittervision: Check out Twittervision for real-time geographic tweets.
6. TwitterLocal: On TwitterLocal, you can find tweets in a designated location.
7. Localtweeps: Check out Localtweeps to find Twitter users near you.

These tools make it very simple to hone in on your nearest and possibly your best market.  Happy hunting!

Tags: Social network, technology, Twitter

Not sure what the hardest thing is in business is because so much of it is challenging.  But one of the hardest things to achieve has to be “insulation from competition”.  Even if you are great at doing whatever you do, someone can always come along and replicate it. Seth Godin, marketing guru, makes the point in Seth’s Blog: Thinking about business models

that building a “tribe”, insulates you from competition.  I can think of some examples of this.  Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. After all it’s only ice cream.  Volkswagon, when it brought out the Beetle.  After all it was only a car.  Apple when it introduced everything from the Mac to the Iphone.  After all, there were competing products, but for those who fell in love with the meticulous design, ease of use and the sheer enjoyment of using the product, there was only Apple.  Here’s how Seth makes that point when thinking about business models”

Tags: business, Business model, how to insulate your business from competition, Market, Marketing and Advertising, Price war, Seth Godin, Viral marketing, Virtual community

Jon Morrow , Associate Editor of Copyblogger, who should know, shares with us this pearl of wisdom:

The Oldest Blogging Myth

“Content is king.”

Well, that is pretty discouraging to those of us who focus on producing or discovering great content.  But then Jon explains what, in our hearts, we already know.  In Why No One Links to Your Best Posts And What to Do About It , Jon points out that this is no longer even Web 2.0. It’s moved beyond that.  The era of social media has arrived and that means Friends: Facebook, FriendFeed, the Twitterati. If you want to be popular, you need to start getting hooked up with very popular friends/fellow bloggers.  Or , as he puts it:

“If you want links now, you need to be more than great. You need to be connected.

The Secret to Building a Popular Blog

Remember the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know?”

Well, it’s kind of true. A mediocre writer that’s friends with every member of the Technorati 100 will become a popular blogger faster than a brilliant writer with no friends at all.

Why? Because bloggers link more often to their friends than anyone else. If you write a reasonably good piece of content that interests their audience, they’ll link to you, mainly because they like you.

The secret to building a popular blog isn’t just writing tons of brilliant content. It’s also having tons of well-connected friends.

How to Make Friends with Popular Bloggers

So… how are you supposed to make friends with all of these popular bloggers and get them to link to your best posts?

Traditional wisdom says you should link to their posts, hoping they’ll notice you and start reading your blog. Sometimes it works, but in my experience, you need to be a little more creative. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Write a guest post that gets lots of traffic and adoring comments
• Attend conferences that all of the “Who’s Who” of your niche go to and network your tail off
• Volunteer to “vote” for any posts that they’re pushing on social media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon
• Email them an irresistible question, hoping to spark a discussion
• Leave lots of truly memorable comments
• Interview them in either a post or a podcast, making sure to ask lots of intelligent questions
• Join their private membership program (like Teaching Sells) and make lots of smart posts in the forums

Give and Ye Shall Receive

We’re not talking about anything new here. Really, it comes down to one of the oldest principles of persuasion: reciprocity.

Contrary to what many people think, A-list bloggers aren’t islands, separate and self-sufficient. They deal with problems and annoyances, just as much as anyone else. If you can help alleviate them, they’ll thank and remember you for it.

The key is finding ways that you can be genuinely useful to them. Make yourself relevant and then use that opportunity to start building a relationship.

Give it a few months, and then start pointing them to your best and most relevant content. They’ll probably link to you anytime you do anything interesting, bringing you lots of readers. They’ll also introduce you to other popular bloggers, giving you a chance to do more favors and expand your network.

It’s hard work, but it’s worth it. If you put as much effort into building relationships as you do writing great content, you’ll have a popular blog in no time.

And better yet, you’ll have made friends with some of the most interesting people on the web. That’s a reward in and of itself.”

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Tags: blog, Copyblogger, Digg, Social media, StumbleUpon, Technorati

David Spark (@dspark), a veteran tech journalist , founder of Spark Media Solutions, who blogs at The Spark Minute, has done a lot of research to see how people succeed at growing their social networks. He discovers the patterns and dishes the inside how to’s at 12 Inspiring Stories of Successful Social Networkers.  They are all interesting and helpful examples, but I particularly liked:

Seed Your Network

“For six months and with only 150 inactive members, the LinkToCharlotte LinkedIn group was languishing. LinkToCharlotte’s goal has always been to connect local businesses and people in the Charlotte, NC area. Founder Andrew Kaplan decided it was time to juice the membership of his group. In June 2008, he reached out to local influencers who could attract others to his local network.

Already having ties with professional sports teams, tourism, and political advisors, Kaplan sent out personal invites to their respective marketing departments to join the group. Quickly seeing the benefits of being part of Kaplan’s local industry network, they in turn sent invites from their lists to join his network as well. Today, LinkToCharlotte’s LinkedIn () group has grown to 2,000, plus it has expanded to include groups on the NING platform, Facebook (), and Twitter ().”

Take a look at how the LinkToCharlotte LinkedIn group , NING platform, Facebook (), and Twitter () all play off each other.  It’s a road map to creating and leveraging your social media assets.

Let me hear what you think if you’ve created or are creating something like this.

Tags: facebook, LinkedIn, Online Communities, Social media, Social network, Twitter

Remember when the Net roared on the scene and created new business models not even imaginable before?  “Opportunities where Amazon is 34x bigger than Barnes & Noble, where NetFlix destroyed Blockbuster, and where Skype is worth $2.6B while telecom companies drop like flies?”

Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software reflects on what’s happening on the net today where, as he sees it…. and it sounds pretty reasonable to me…the same pattern is emerging, just in a different guise.

In, Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don’t want toJason talks about how social media has already changed the rules of the game. Here’s his take:

“The days of “have a website and advertise” are over. It’s too expensive to be noticed on an Internet that’s already full.

Social media is the only way LinksFor.Us could get traction. If Darren Rowse or Brian Clark talks about it, it’s visible. If it hits the front page of Digg, it’s visible. Once it’s visible, once you have things like incoming links and lots of regular traffic, then you have a shot at using traditional SEO techniques for staying visible. But social media is the only way to overcome static friction (short of spending crazy money).

Social media is already changing the rules of the marketplace, just like the web did a decade ago. It’s still early of course and no one — not even the experts — knows where all this is going. But it’s clear that times are changing again, and those that don’t jump in will go the way of print media.

Want examples?

• In a test run by BazaarVoice, Rubbermaid discovered that adding customer reviews to their website increased sales and decreased returns of their products. Skeptics said sales of low-rated products would crater. What actually happened is that sales of low-rated products increased. When shoppers were questioned, they explained that when they read why someone else maligned the product, often they disagreed or didn’t care about that particular problem. If the price was right, it was worth buying anyway.
• Fog Creek software makes millions of dollars from FogBugz, a bug-tracking system. There’s hundreds of bug-tracking systems — free, cheap, expensive, open-source, commercial — yet Fog Creek is highly visible and successful with no advertising. How? Because the founder, Joel Spolsky, has built an incredibly popular blog about writing software. He was before his time; before RSS he wrote essays and notified you by email when a new one was posted. It’s widely agreed that without the blog-before-it-was-called-a-blog, Fog Creek would likely have remained an unknown consulting company with a few struggling products.
• Nike allowed people to build and order custom shoes on their website. Skeptics said deep customization is too expensive, design-sharing is too complicated, and people need to try shoes on. Wrong! Once the site took off, Nike created physical stores where you could do the same thing.  Joaquin Hidalgo, Nike VP of Global Brand Marketing says those stores now “represent 25% of our revenue.”
• Speaking of shoes, Zappos also sells shoes on the Internet. CEO Tony Hsieh is so convinced that their legendary Twitter presence results in sales, he even wrote a popular beginner’s guide to Twitter. He insists that Twitter and other forms of open communication are required for excellent customer service; employees are trained in Twitter. Zappos raked in $1B last year even with the recession; they’re doing something right.
• Oddly-named marketing site Marketing.fm gets double the traffic of marketing.com. One has a blog with useful content and one doesn’t. Guess which is which.
• Zeus Jones describes 16 more terrific examples. (Thanks to David S. Finch for digging it up.)”

Conclusion: better jump in now while you still can and keep leveraging up with social media. Or, as Jason puts it, “Will there be another new thing someday? Sure.

But today and for the foreseeable future, this is the world. You have to jump in even if you don’t yet understand it.”

Tags: Fog Creek, FogBugz, Netflix, Social media, Twitter, Zappos

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t put out a blog, manage several websites, keep up with the social media and work with clients if I didn’t have lots of help from fast, efficient online tools and services which speed up the process and make it more effective.  One of my favorite services which I use every day, is Zemanta which is co-pilot of my blog, offering relevant links, suggesting keywords, providing related articles in case I want to poke around the blogosphere a bit, and, usually, providing a pretty good graphic I can append to give a little pop to the story.  There are many more excellent, time saving services out there.

Orli Yakuel,  who maintains GO2WEB20 Blog and Go2web20.net, the largest online directory for Web 2.0 applications worldwide, says she enjoys keeping herself on the forefront of the ever-evolving Web 2.0 industry; her take on these services is in  10 Services with Realtime Functionality:

It seems like “Real-time” is a term that’s getting a lot of usage lately and seeing a rise in terms of trends. Services that have some kind of real-time functionality surely receive more attention from users. The reason it gets so much attention is not just because it’s trendy, in most cases it can simplify online work. The rise of it also derives from the need to do everything faster and more efficiently, after all, it’s part of the web evolution. Now, of course not every service should have this ability, but for many services this real-time function can offer a huge added value to the people who use them. Here are some good examples: EtherPad is a realtime collaborative text editing service. As you edit the document area, your changes are seen live by everyone else. You can create your own pad and share with up to 8 people. There’s no account required. This makes it easy to use the product, but also means you can’t keep track of a list of your pads online. SkyGrid streams filtered content in realtime. The service gathers up millions of articles online – including top mainstream business news sites, blogs, news releases, and other information. Then SkyGrid filters the articles to find which ones are from trusted sources. chartbeat shows you real-time traffic to your website and allows you to set alerts for any downtime or spikes in traffic. In addition, chartbeat lets you track arbitrary search terms in twitter. Monitor your website name, URL, or anything else you’d like. Friendfeed (beta) streams you & your friends updates in realtime. You’ll see your friends’ photos and messages stream in as they’re shared. Comments and likes also get displayed as they happen. Still missing the speed control feature. Delicious Spy allows you to see in realtime what people are saving to their delicious accounts right now. You can share links directly to Delicious, Digg or Reddit network from within this app, and you can also save links for later (something that Friendfeed should embrace) Twitzap is a realtime Twitter monitoring app. You can create channels, and track the stuff that matters you the most. On top of that, TwitZap users can tweet each other in realtime using the Twitter accelerator technology even while Twitter is down. I wrote about Twazzup few days ago. It’s a realtime search engine for Twitter updates, with lots of useful features. I switched from the regular twitter-search and never looked back… This one is absolutely a treasure. It’s an image search powered by twitter & twitpic that shows realtime saved pictures. TwiPICK lets you to search by keywords and also show you the number of Retweets ontop of the picture itself. You can stop the madness in anytime. Monitter is a personal twitter monitor, it lets you “monitter” the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying about stuff that matters to you. If you haven’t tried Zemanta go download it now, or at least try their interactive Demo! So far I tried this on my blog platform (Blogger) and my Gmail – Overall, it searches relevant links & photos while you’re typing your blog post or email. Amazing little plugin with an excellent usability. Update: I don’t know how it slipped my mind but Blip.fm is also a fine service that enables you to see your friends published music in realtime. Get instant blip updates from the entire community. And listen to free streaming music from a global community of internet DJs. Labels: real-time, twitter

Tags: chartbeat, Delicious, etherpad, FriendFeed, monitter, SkyGrid, twazzup, twipick, twitpzap

Anyway you can increase the interactivity with your website or blog, it’s a good thing.  The more instantaneously you can involve your visitors with the stream of the conversation, the more interested and involved they are likely to be.  Now, Jennifer Van Grove, shows us a whole new, easy way to do this in Trackle It: Offer Instant Notifications to Your Site’s Visitors:

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Tags: notifcations, Notify.me, Short message service, SMS, Trackle