Category Archives: Tech Edge

Web Evolution: Realtime, Faster, More Efficient Services

: Image via CrunchBase

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

Want To Offer Instant Notifications to Your Site’s Visitors? Now You Can

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:

Trackle, a personal alerts site similar to notify.me, is flipping their product offering inside out and tweaking it to fit the other half of the Web — content publishers.

Launching today, Trackle It will give website owners the ability to offer viewers custom content subscription options. The add-on is designed to let visitors subscribe to all types of new content via email or SMS, and then share it through their social network of choice.

By adding Trackle It to your site, the idea is that you’ll be able to serve your audience with the subscriptions options of their choice. So whatever your content is, be it new products, travel guides, or content-rich blog posts, you can better serve the user base that wants to be notified of updates instantly via the medium of their choice.

Implementation appears to be pretty painless, and is basically determined by the quantity of customization, data being tracked, and statistics desired. But basically it’s as simple as embedding a “Trackle this” button within your site’s code.

Trackle It is an obvious idea — on-demand content based on user preference — that we’ve yet to see implemented really well. We’re certainly intrigued by their offering, but its success will depend upon the quantity and quality of publishers implementing the feature, plus user adoption of Trackle.

Lure In Users With Your Trackle Box (techcrunch.com)
Trackle Feeds You Personalized RSS (techcrunch.com)

Hacked on Google Gmail!

: Image via CrunchBase

I don’t know about you but I always thought Google was one of the great companies of the world. All those brains. All that technology. Exploring the earth the seas and the heavens. Clever art for every holiday and special occasion. All that money!

But that perception was taken down a peg or two on April 17, 2009 when some nasty Nigerian/Ghana hacker seized control of my gmail account and, apparently, hundreds or thousands or millions of others as well. He shot out an email to my list, including my business list, saying I was stranded, penniless and desperate in Africa and needed $1,600 for a meal and to make it home.

I began getting a flood of phone calls and emails asking if I was ok. Friends, friends of friends and business associates from New York, California, Washington D.C. and elsewhere wanted to know if it was true, was I ok, did I need money. I had to explain…..and am still explaining…. I am ok, not in Africa, appreciate their concern but this is a scam. My gmail account has taken on a pan handling life of it’s own. And I certainly hope no well intentioned person got duped into wiring money to some “hotel manager” in a country that lives off these nasty scams.

I am still working through a bureaucratic process to reclaim my account with Google. I had Google gmail, docs, custom rss feeds, Adsense advertising, Adwords, Google gadgets and others Google services. Like I said, I loved Google, it’s expertise, ease of use, tech savvy. But now I am waiting on Google to restore my service. And Google doesn’t seem to get it. This was their mistake, not mine. It was their company that was sabotaged, not mine. Yes, I could open a new account but it would not have the entire history of my business correspondance on it. Google should be sending their customers roses and Godiva candy, not to mention apologies; they should be working around the clock to restore service…… particularly to some one like me who has been splitting ad revenue with them and receiving funds at a bank where I can identify the date and amount of the last deposit, the same system Paypal and others use to verify accounts.

So Google has definitely taken a hit in my judgment, not just because of the entire hacking and scam disaster. Their handling of the crisis isn’t shaping up as well as it should either. And I’m amazed the media hasn’t made a big deal of it. So, as a blogger and citizen journalist, I thought I’d share this cautionary tale with you. And I will keep you posted on the Google response and the ultimate outcome. If some major media outlet doesn’t do it first. Which would be fine with me.

How To Follow A Social Media Road Map

As Chris Brogan said recently, having a social media strategy is no easy task. It takes a lot of hard work. But if one follows a proven path, some of the difficulty falls away, and the process becomes easier. One still needs discipline and consistency, but the path to success is clear. Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success provides, among other elements, a social media road map:

“However you look at it, SEO and social media work well together as long as there is a framework for doing so. One way to build SEO and social media programs efficiently is to follow a social media roadmap:

1. Find the audience; understand their behaviors, preferences, methods of publishing, and sharing. Most companies that are involved with the social web in the channels where their customers spend time have a good sense of where to start. Many companies are ahead of the game by tracking their audience via social media monitoring software that identifies keywords, conversations and influencers such as those pictured in the Radian6 screen shot below.

2. Define your objectives. Objectives are often driven by marketing or sales, and SEO has long been directly accountable to substantial improvements in web sales. Social media is not direct marketing though, so different objectives and measurements apply. The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence discovery of social communities or content via search. Do a search for Zappos on Google, for example, and you’ll easily find more than shoes: Twitter, Blog and a YouTube () channel are all on the first page of search results.

Indirectly, social content can boost links to website content, improving search traffic and online sales.

3. Establish a game plan. The game plan for reaching objectives in a combined SEO and social media effort will often focus on content and interaction, since it is content that people discover and share. Whether a keyword-focused strategy for reaching goals means publishing new content or creating an opportunity for consumer-generated content, it must involve proactive promotion and easy sharing amongst members of the community.

4. Create a tactical mix. The tactical mix for a social media marketing effort is based on doing the homework of finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content. Whatever the tactical mix is, it’s an investment in time and relationships – not a short term “link dump” to promote optimized link bait. Much of the content creation and promotion for a social media marketing effort happens within the tactical mix and, of course, that means optimizing content for keywords.

Whether content is created by marketers as part of a social destination like a niche community or a promotion vehicle such as an interactive ad, keyword glossaries become useful for writing headlines, deciding on anchor text for links and outreach activities like blogger relations.

5. Measure your goals. Goals measurement should roll up to the specific objectives, both direct and indirect. Leveraging both social media monitoring services as well as web analytics can provide marketers with the insight to improve results. Radian6 and Webtrends have recently announced a partnership that will bring web analytics and social media analytics together all in one interface. In the meantime, marketers can use specific measurement tools to monitor the effect of their social web participation as well as the search engine performance of SEO efforts.”

It’s all about results. If you don’t measure you won’t know what your results are. If you try this, let us hear how you do and what you’ve learned you’d like to share. In social media, we’re all in this together

Energize Your Website Or Blog With A Google Gadget

: Image via CrunchBase

Given the enormous commitment of time and energy it takes to maintain an interesting and robust website or blog, I’ll take all the sophisticated, tech-savvy help I can get. I keep a keen eye out for those “widgets” or “gadgets” as Google calls them, those tiny pieces of automated code that you can install on your page to work tirelessly behind the scenes.

Google Gadgets For Your Webpage offers you everything from mundane functions, like clocks and weather, but also gadgets which can make your site a lot more interactive, like Desktop Chat, Google Talk, Twitter or Facebook, right from your own page.

Yesterday, I started experimenting with Google’s customized RSS feed, which can bring your favorite “stream of news and updates” from your favorite sites to your own webpage. It’s very simple. You just grab the code or tweak the colors, size etc., then grab the code. I started first by installing several customized RSS feeds, in different colors, or “color coded”, putting up social media, tech news and updates, and “5 minutes for Mom” on my site, AdvancingWomen.com. I am so pleased with that, I put on Twitter and Facebook. Next I will be adding Google Talk to a number of pages. Well, I’m pretty blown away with what Google offers so easily. I can tell you I’d been wrestling with some other RSS feeds for awhile, and having trouble to get them to look and act quite the way I wanted. So the simplicity and dynamism of Google’s Gadgets was a big hit with me. Give it a try. And let us know what you think and what gadgets worked particularly well for you.

How To Build An Attractive, User-Friendly Website Any Non-Techie Can Update And Maintain

We are well past the days when WordPress was only for blogs. Now WordPress is considered a full featured content management system (CMS). And the beauty of it is, once set up, absolutely anyone with 15 or 20 minutes of training can go in and update and maintain the content. It’s a simple matter of opening the site in the right place and inserting or updating whatever you want. I have trained students and admin assistants who were able to master this in no time. Of course, someone web savvy has to be available for the occassional question.

What I’ve found to be the trickiest part of creating websites for others is determining how much the site owner really wants to update their own system. Some like to do it all, or have an intern or assistant who is happy to do it. Other professionals don’t want to touch it with the proverbial 10 feet pole. I’m not sure why that is. I don’t know if they are tech phobic or are afraid of it or think their professional station puts them above that kind of work. Although why some professionals are willing to pay webmasters to do clerical work is something I don’t quite understand particularly when I explain their assistant can probably do it, or they can pay someone $10 an hour to do it. But, be that as it may, it’s the job of the service provider to keep the client happy, so if someone doesn’t want to update their own system, that’s fine. But the fact is, anyone with 15 or 20 minutes training can update and maintain a WordPress website.

WordPress as a Content Management System – a state-of-the-art publishing platform which is feature rich, continuously updated, with thousands of man hours in development time and a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

Features which extend the already deep functionality, include the following:

• Plug ins which automate hundreds of the most useful tasks from SEO (search engine optimization, so your website can and will be found) to placing advertisements, should you want them, on every post. New plug ins are offered almost daily

• Widgets, individual pieces of code which provide a single interaction to frequently used functions such as clocks, calendars, news aggregators. Widgets have the capability of automatically updating content areas of your website. For an example, a widget might be used to automatically update the navigation sidebar as new pages are added.

• Themes control the look and feel of the website in this system. The site owner has access to a choice of hundreds of themes, which are constantly updated and to which additional themes are added continuously. A theme may be changed with a single click.

• Support – Because of the popularity and widespread use of this platform, it is supported by extensive developer communities, experts, technicians and web hosts, so there is ample support for whatever your needs are or might become in the future. This eliminates the potential for a site owner to be marooned with obscure or little used software and platform and consequently face the difficult task of finding support to fix technical issues or adjust to changing needs.

Training, Continuous Updating and Maintenance

As web developer or webmaster, or if you hire someone to do this work, you may want to add the following services…. the first is a necessity but, as mentioned, usually only takes about 20 minutes.
•    Provide whatever training is needed to adjust to the new system.
•    Provide a monthly review and audit that both identifies trouble spots and recommends improvements and also assures continuous smooth operation of the site owner’s system
•    Upgrade the website’s software and plugins monthly, as needed or required

Trust me, this is easy. If you have any trouble or issues, give me a shout at gretchen@ggwebgroup.com. And…..good luck!

Effective Website Development Project Plan (forwardleap.com)
Great Place For WordPress Themes! (secondprinciple.com)
Another Reason To Love WordPress–Plugins (appscout.com)

Spiffy Digital Goods To Enhance Your Blog Or Website – For Net Setters

You know how it is when you start reading one thing on the Web, become engaged, then, like following a trail of crumbs, it leads you into a whole different experience?

Well, that is what I did when I got intrigued reading about a new blog, Netsetter , about online entrepreneurs dubbed here “the net setters”, remniscent of the old, jaded term, the jet setters. I pretty much got hooked when I stumbled upon the author/creator’s bootstrapping experience. More on that in a minute. First, let me tell about my discovery of a site, which I plan to use and you may want to use as well ,which offers tools and resources for “net setters”. It’s Envato, a digital goods marketplace and from there you can find, FlashDen ,a community of buyers and sellers of stock Adobe Flash components; FlashDen’s sister site AudioJungle, which has branched into music tracks, loops and sound effects. And you can also find:

ThemeForest – a marketplace for buying and selling site templates and CMS themes
VideoHive – a marketplace for buying and selling stock footage, motion graphics and video project files.
GraphicRiver – a marketplace for buying and selling layered photoshop, vectors, icons and add-ons.

Now, the back story. I am always drawn to stories of entrepreneurs who bootstrap their way to glory. I’ve bootstrapped businesses many times and I also like to share these stories because I think they show the light at the end of the tunnel when you’re in the tough midst of a bootstrapping experience yourself. The founder of Envato and also Netsetter is a fellow named Collis. He has the archetypal bootstrapping story. I’ll let him tell it:

“..Having no money is pretty much the ultimate constraint a startup can be under, and for most bootstrappers that’s not far from how they have to operate.

Having nothing forces you to figure out a way to bring in some income – any income – and to do so fast. It forces you to work out how to do things in the cheapest way possible. It forces you to really, truly evaluate what is necessary in your business and what is simply deadweight.

When my wife and I cofounded Envato, we did so while working a freelance business where invoices always got paid late and cash flow was erratic. We started out with some modest savings in the bank but by the time our first site was up, we were thirty thousand in debt, I had worked for four months without a day off, lived for two of those months with my in-laws to save money and still there was no sign of a reprieve.

Because we spent everything we had, and then some, on building our website we were forced into a series of practices that made our business ultimately viable. We had no revenue, so none of the three founders could quit our jobs – we just started working one in the day, and one in the evening. We had no money so we couldn’t hire anyone beyond our one valiantly underpaid freelance developer, so every job had to be done by one of us – regardless of whether we knew how to do it. We had no advertising budget so we had to embark on a series of guerrilla marketing strategies trading time and ingenuity for money. We had no content on the site and no users, so we made a whole heap ourselves and invited, cajoled, persuaded and begged people to test it out.

In short we saved and scrimped, worked in odd hours and off hours, used our lack of income as a motivator to find revenue quickly and basically did it tough. Nobody saw a pay cheque for the first year, and even today after two and a half years when we have a staff of twenty something, I’m proud to say that all the management team and founders still get paid far less than the top authors on our sites.

Under the umbrella of Envato. we’ve build digital goods marketplaces like FlashDen and ThemeForest, a chain of successful tutorial blogs at Tuts+, a popular freelancing community at FreelanceSwitch, some successful ebooks at Rockable Press and lots of other projects!”

Well, there you have it. That’s how bootstrapping is done. And Collis has done all this since 2006. Pretty impressive! Congrats!

Best Twitter Apps

: Image via CrunchBase

If you’re going to use Twitter….. and you should…. you might as well get the best apps to support you…. to make the process faster and more automated. Serious users consider Tweetdeck a must. Also Hellotxt can be useful, since it updates from web, mobile, sms, email, 3rd party applications, API to more than 35 social network at the same time.

You can also take a look at the 21 most popular Twitter applications ranked by TechCrunch that produced these monthly traffic results:

1. Twitpic	1,236,828
2. Tweetdeck	285,864
3. Digsby	233,472
4. Twittercounter	212,200
5. Twitterfeed	149,812
6. Twitterholic	147,164
7. Twhirl	143,333
8. Twitturly	88,793
9. Twtpoll	74,154
10. Retweetist	60,051
11. Tweepler	51,304
12. Hellotxt	45,754
13. Twitdom	45,411
14. Tweetscan	44,463
15. Tweetburner	41,754
16. Tweetvisor	31,621
17. Twittervision	30,708
18. Twitterfall	29,592
19. Monitter	25,433
20. Twibs	17,168
21. Twistori	16,229
22. Twitbin	14,986

Twitter Client War: Twhirl vs. TweetDeck (scobleizer.com)
Blogs Who Covered the Twhirl Launch and How Your Social Software Desktop Looks Like (loiclemeur.com)

Guide To Using Twitter For Business

: Image via Wikipedia

Whether you’re a big business or a small business, you need to get the word out, particularly in this tough economic time.

This is Derek Halpern’s one-stop source for all Twitter resources that relate specifically to business. You will learn how people acquire customers and grow their business using Twitter. Additionally, you will see a few examples of large companies who use Twitter effectively.