Tim O’Reilly said that in the age of Web 2.0, data is the next “Intel Inside”. With the ever increasing popularity of social networks, the volume of personalized user data is a virtual goldmine for Internet businesses. Facebook has been getting much press lately due to its tremendous growth, as well as emphasis on security and privacy. Interestingly, Dan Birdwhistell wrote an interesting guest post at TechCrunch, claiming to have a legal workaround to accessing and storing Facebook user data for 3rd party use. He says,
There’s one thing about Facebook that most people still seem to have wrong: that it’s a walled garden. Quite the contrary, the Platform allows for full data portability and has since its inception. It actually isn’t a walled garden at all.
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Social networking just keeps on growing. It seems every major public business wants a Facebook application, corporations are adding social features to their websites, and organisations are bringing social networking into their intranets. Previously, building your own social networking applications involved some serious engineering challenges. Thanks to Ringside Networks, that just got a lot easier, with an open source (LGPL) social networking server built entirely on LAMP.
Every blogger dreams about creating viral content, infecting people with your ideas and being the talk of the town. But how exactly does one go about it? Unfortunately, there really aren’t hard and fast rules. Even experienced bloggers will tell you that luck has a lot to do with it. It’s a matter of great timing and having the right people spread your post, creating that domino effect.
There are, however, some pointers you can follow, and if lady luck should smile upon you, your content may just spread like wildfire. So before you click that “Publish” button, check if you have done your due diligence on the following:
Quality Content will not go viral if it isn’t special. Your topic should be unique, and your grammar near flawless. If it has pictures or videos included, a bit of polishing may be in order. Also, make sure you do thorough research on the subject, which should be relevant to your niche.
Quantity Lists are some of the perennial fixtures in the viral content sphere. It’s been proven that people love “Top 10” and “Best of” listings. If you can extend that to “Top 100”, better – as long as you don’t sacrifice the overall quality of the article, of course.
Originality With the sheer volume of content flying around, you’ve got be quite unusual to get noticed. Either that, or you’re the first to announce something huge that will blow people away. The point is, viral content must be something that jolts people and makes them go, “OMG!”
Controversy It’s true what they say: “Bad publicity is still publicity.” Don’t be afraid to publish unpopular opinions. Debate and controversy make people engaged in a discussion. If they get emotionally invested in your story, they’ll be more likely to tell other people about it.
Study Learn what other people are doing. Go to Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, and all the other leading social bookmarking sites. Find out what’s hot and analyze what makes them click. Get some tips on how to write a proper viral headline, and see if there’s a common denominator in terms of writing styles.
In part 1 of this series, I looked at the web browsers and (Windows) IDEs. Today I’m going to look at a local development server and its PHP configuration, as well as some of the IDEs/editors available for Linux, especially the cross-platform options.
Over the last few years, there’s been much talk about how social media releases are replacing traditional press releases. True, the old method has its flaws. Tom Foremski called it too “spintastic” – full of gravy, not much meat. So are traditional press releases going in the way of the dinosaurs? The answer is no – at least not yet.
Hard habit to break. Not everyone is clamoring for change. Some news people are content with traditional press releases. It’s an art that’s over 100 years old. Change will take some getting used to. As for how long, that remains to be seen. The format of traditional PRs is easily adaptable for publishing. Just a few tweaks here and there, and it’s ready, if you don’t mind all the embellishments. It’s a convenience more than a few will miss.
Bend it as you please. Social media releases are being shaped to be more factual and straight-forward than traditional press releases. For the companies and other agencies, this severely limits their influence on how the news will be delivered to the readers. The journalists/bloggers will have to interpret the data for themselves. They may neglect parts which companies want to highlight, or focus on things that are not very flattering.
Best of both worlds. Most PR outfits nowadays distribute both kinds of releases. Though SMRs have its advantages, there are still a lot to learn, and there’s also the distribution factor to be considered (the Internet is not the primary news source for everyone). A working group has been formed to create a standard for social media releases, but until that’s finished, approved, and tested, it’s best to be on the safe side. For now, both ships still sail.
IT projects are, by their nature, destined to fail. When you plan for a new project, you’ll probably realise that while what you’re bui/lding isn’t new, it ts new to you, and you’re bound to encounter some surprises along the way. Maybe you haven’t quite thought out how you’re going to build a specific feature – and when you get to actually building the application, it takes a lot longer than you expect. Or maybe your client decides to change the project requirements half way through when he sees your beta. Here are five ways to avoid cost and timeframe blowouts in your freelance project.
If you are a Facebook application developer, you are certainly familiar with the dialog tool they provide for you. You can display HTML contents, a HTML block and set callback functions for default buttons. It is really very easy and enjoying to use the dialog component. But what if you want to use it in your local web application? There is no way you can import that component for your web app. So all you have to do is to create one from scratch.
But wait, there are some good people over there who already feel the pain and developed a facebook like dialog component for you. This component comes as a plugin of jQuery and works really cool. You can display static HTML contents as well as load external content via AJAX. You can find this component named “Facebox” by clicking here
Integrating Facebox with your site is easy. Just include the javascript file of jquery and facebox. And add the following script at the end of your page. <script> $(document).ready(function(){ $('a[@rel*=facebox]').facebox(); }); </script>
<script> $(document).ready(function(){ $('a[@rel*=facebox]').facebox(); }); </script>
Lets have a look at the following example
1. To load an external page <a href="http://www.google.com/logos/spring08.gif" rel="facebox">text</a>
<a href="http://www.google.com/logos/spring08.gif" rel="facebox">text</a>
2. To display static content jquery.facebox("Here is some <b>static content</b>");
jquery.facebox("Here is some <b>static content</b>");
or
$.facebox("Here is some <b>static content</b>");
Thats it! you got a nice dialog component for your web application.
PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository, contains hundreds of freely available packages that can be reused in your application. Packages usually come with various functionality within one or more classes, and the PEAR coding standards make sure packages follow the same general style for ease of implementation. Best of all; they’re all entirely open source, from MIT to GPL.
However, many of these packages are bloated, slow and full of specialised features that you may never want to use. Sifting through the repository is also a challenge; a basic category system is in place, but it’s hard to tell what you want when you don’t know what’s available. Here are some gems from the PEAR repository that you could really find useful. (more…)
This is part 2 of our series on “How to Sell SEO to the Web Challenged”.
3) Expect comparisons with traditional advertising “So why should we avail of SEO services when we have ______ advertising? What would this increase in traffic do to us?” Now here is where it gets tricky. When we asked you earlier to dispel the wrong notions about SEO, it’s because SEO isn’t really an exact science. No SEO expert can really predict the increase in sales being on the top of search engines bring. So how is SEO different from the traditional advertising? With traditional advertising, the potential for generating revenue lasts only as long as the advertising does. In SEO, the effect on revenues goes on and on.
4) Know your audience Your audience may not be knowledgeable about SEO, but they may be an expert on another field. The key here is to understand that SEO may be filled with jargons and terms, but at its core, it relies on tried and tested principles, the same principles used by traditional marketing. So research and find out what language they use. Try to find out how you can explain SEO using their language and before long, you’d be seeing them bobbing their heads, understanding the things you are talking about. And once they do understand what you are talking about, you are now ready to start talking about the services that you offer.
5) Provide Additional Resources Create an SEO 101 primer that you’ll give out to new clients. It could be an ebook, video, or printed pamphlet. Make sure to include the following: what the clients should expect, a simplified overview of the working process, as well as additional services you provide. It also helps to provide the client with progress reports throughout the course of the SEO work as this lets them know how far the project has come. When presenting information, try to use easy-to-understand visuals rather than numbers. If you can, present case studies of previous work so that the client has a better idea of what to expect.
So, you’ve decided you’re knowledgeable enough now and would like to start selling SEO services. That’s great. Now if you are starting to sell your services to people who have ideas what SEO is, then usually a deal will be sealed and done without too much snags.
But what if your client has no inkling on what SEO is all about? How do you then sell SEO services? Usually, you have to do a crash course before you start rattling off the pricing for your services, making sure they understand what they are getting into. So better polish those layman terms and get ready to explain exactly what SEO is about.
1) Dispel the wrong notions of SEO outright. Believe it or not, there are still those who believe that SEO “will generate sure sales of their products” as soon as you get the site back up and running. Now the problem here is that when they don’t get an increase in sales immediately, the least they can do is to call you a thief or something to that effect. So dispel them right away.
2) Tell your clients what they are buying…. Slowly. Tell them what SEO is and what it is not. Don’t spew out jargon while explaining. Remember, these are people who don’t know SEO. So don’t go all out and start talking about Result Pages, redirects, keyword density. The idea here is to get the client understand what you are offering him by slowly getting into the details one by one.
a. Explain the Search Engine – So you start with search engines. Don’t even try to attempt to explain what algorithms are, as you would probably met with dazed looks. The best way to go about explaining search engines is by making it clear what they really are and how they arrive with such results, including the ranking. Once you’ve gotten past that hurdle, then it’s time to explain that each search engine is different from one another and that they return different search results.
b. Moving on to Links – “Aren’t these the ones you click on to get to another page?” Well, yeah, but when it comes to SEO, you also have to explain that these links are a factor when it comes to ranking your site on search engines. Now since you will be doing all the SEO work, you don’t have to go through all the topics regarding links. Once you have briefly explained in simple terms why links are important, then you can move on to the next topic which is…
c. Keywords – Quite a simple topic to discuss. Just explain the rudimentary principles behind keywords and how they work hand in hand with search engines. Also, put in the importance of keyword research just to give them an idea about another part of your job if ever they avail of your services.
